Archive for the 'Science' Category

I keep waiting for the smart home. It’s pretty moot to me since my home looks pretty brill. Do we really want smart homes — homes that do everything for us automatically? I had a lot of PR material sent to me about smart AND dumb homes while compiling “2011” and have thus decided we’d be in trouble if the smart home invaded. And, in the words of Mad Magazine’s dearly departed founder —WHAT IF, you know…?

• Your “Smart Home” crashes and won’t let you in?
• Your toaster can’t find the software to toast your bread?
• You can’t multitask in your home- because if you use the washer, dryer, TVs, hair dryers, computers, printer, fax at the same time-because your house will slow down or freeze and have to be constantly rebooted?
• You haven’t upgraded your home to Windows Latest Crap and so the home can’t open up any of your windows? Wouldn’t that suck!
• Your home has to do time for “performing an illegal operation” and thanks to these occurring you constantly have no place to live?
• Your washing machine loses more than stray socks since you didn’t press the SAVE function?
• Your kid didn’t do as well on the college boards as your “Smart Home,” and your home got into a better college?
• Your “Smart Home” lost all of its smart data and became silly since you didn’t backup?
• You have to take courses every time your home has to be upgraded –formerly remodeled or repaired – if you didn’t upgrade, you can’t get replacement parts for your home or appliances?
• Your voice activated smart-pants home understands your “Honey, I’m home” command as “Honey, I’m a burglar,” and phones the cops cause it doesn’t believe you’re that honey. (”Lucy?”)
• It takes your microwave and all of your previously “instant on” electronics and appliances five minutes to recover from a crash?
• Your home flashes an error message, and your home and everything in it disappears because you didn’t save in a new file?
• Your home has obtained a virus and has to be quarantined from other homes?
• You can’t figure out Home’s many-thousand-page operating manual — neither can your kid, oy — and Amazon and all brick and mortar shops are out of “Smart Homes for Dummies?”
• Your one-stop-shopping bill that bundles your energy, cable, phone, and broadband services offers the worst of each service — everything goes out in a storm, service is provided by former cable company technicians, and you get interrupted during dinner constantly about switching to a new provider?
• The nanotechnology security system—which is smaller than a piece of dust — went up your child’s nose but no one knew because it couldn’t be seen and each time he sneezed, your alarm went off?
• Your refrigerator and the items in it and your dishwasher and detergent are communicating more than the — um — spouses?
• Robots can operate everything in your ID-enhanced house and decide human inhabitants aren’t needed because they just make a mess?
• Your “Smart Home” can’t keep pace with the Jones’ homes that are smarter?
• You’re kept on hold with bad music daily trying to reach Tech Service about your home network, which keeps going down? (That music is one of the ways in which the term “bad” reintroduces itself to you while waiting for someone to service you!)

The future is not about living like the Jetsons, and most of the cool stuff coming will be subtler and more seamless than the introduction of a pad that makes your own look schmaltzy. Hug your house.

Self-styled marketing guru Martin Lindstrom has followed up Brand Sense with the much-discussed Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, his own tale of a multiyear journey through the most in-depth scientific study ever conducted on why we buy what we buy and why some brands “stick” and others don’t. Lindstrom secured funding from international corporations and conducted his study in several countries in order to cast a wide net of subjects. The resulting book is entertaining and yet the results of the study are somewhat counterintuitive.

Without ruining the ending, which I would never want to do, the main thesis of Buyology seems to be that neuroscience and analysis can tell us far more about how the human mind handles the abstract concept of “brand” than traditional notions of market research can. This seems obvious. After all, humans are strange animals, and predicting our behavior is a crapshoot.

We must realize that research like Lindstrom’s isn’t the Rosetta Stone of marketing. The research is solid and pretty darn intriguing, but it does run into a problem now and again when it collides with the intangible human portion of the recipe.

Early on, during a section about a research project regarding advertising during the course of the ‘04 presidential election, the scientists reached this conclusion: “Despite widespread cries that political advertising emphasize “optimism,” “hope,” “building up, not tearing down,” and so on, fear works. It’s what our brains remember.”

This year, we have seen cases where it is simply not true. Have we encountered an exception to the rule or is there no quantifiable rule here after all? Why did Americans choose Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 in overwhelming numbers even when “optimism” and “hope” have been scientifically proven to be disqualifiers? There is something here that brain tech can’t grasp.

Then, another study in Buyology concluded that frequent smokers understand the risks involved with smoking, but that after being shown disgusting black-lung warning labels, they still want the sticks. The brain scans saw the brain processing the images, and recognized how bad they were, but that part of the consciousness disregarded this in favor of that ole nicotine high. Smokers ignore warning labels. Of course they do! They are physiologically addicted to the chemicals in cigarettes! Addicts cannot be dissuaded from behaviors that their body craves, even if they subconsciously know those behaviors are unhealthful. Yep, decades of research on that one.

The point is that while the overly conscientious research in Buyology should open the eyes of anyone involved in our marketing businesses it is not the be-all, end-all in the quest for data in marketing. Lindstrom reminds us that information-gathering is evolving all the time. Gallup polls may soon be antiquated (are they now?) and marketers will need to find crucial information about everything some other way.

Brain tech may be a key piece of forging this next frontier of figuring what the consumer really wants (Lindstrom made a compelling case in the previous book) but it simply cannot be the only one. There are human elements that are even less quantifiable than those thousands of brain scans. In Outliers the curly-haired Gladwell proves beyond a 5 o’clock shadow that humans are capable of devising wayward rules that affect and control the decisions we make—and our destinies. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for Punk Marketing to read both of these books concurrently.

Pinning down the brain is nearly impossible—as humans we complicate everything we do. I realized as the book snapped shut that this, in the end, belies “buyology.”