Only Old Guys Care About Privacy

David Rowan is the editor of Wired UK and he recently wrote about why he is not active on facebook. This interested me. I’m much older than David – who admits to being the wrong side of 30 yrs while I try not to admit to being the wrong side of 50. I, too, am very inactive on facebook. It’s partly a brand thing – feels more relevant to my kids than me – but I confess to a certain unease about sharing too much stuff on a social site motivated by profit.

David Rowan is much more explicit about his worries. Apart from the general point that sites like facebook are not motivated by your self – interest he goes on to list several other concerns. Giving away too much information makes it harder to reinvent yourself (mature maybe?) in later years. Information supplied for one purpose will invariably be used for another that you did not sign up for and indeed, may be used against you – are you happy to share everything about yourself with a prospective employer? People can be selective in what they choose to republish about you to paint a less attractive picture – people like journalists. Social sites lull us into revealing more than we realize and clever search allows that to be singled out.

Facebook have a Privacy policy that runs to some 5,830 words, nearly a third longer than the US Constitution, but it amounts to “we can do what we want with what we know” apparently. If this seems alarmist on David Rowan’s part you might like to bear in mind that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying he believes the world would be better place if none of us had any secrets. Hard to argue with that. We would behave better if we felt every thing we ever said, did, wrote or thought was freely and readily available to all our fellow citizens. We would be good – but not for goodness sake. Not sure that’s the world I’d like to inhabit (it is of course the world you already inhabit if you believe in God and divine retribution).

Rowan wrote his piece in response to a colleague’s taunt that only old guys care about privacy. In fact the proportion of younger users of facebook who are becoming more circumspect and private in terms of their use of the site is higher than the older users. We all care about privacy, perhaps if you are older you are better able to understand why. You have more experience of the benefit that comes of mistakes you were able to keep private versus the downside of the ones sadly you were not.

I am a firm believer in Permission Marketing especially in today’s ‘Wired’ World. I think the transaction must be clear – I tell you certain things in return for you using them to my explicit benefit. I am involved in one such business and am aware of others that are being developed. I think we’ll see more and more of this. People will share information about themselves if they can see you will use it responsibly and transparently and they get something out of this. No harm in marketing to people if they want you to. I love cars and would happily share insights on what I own, what I like, what I think about cars etc. if you promise to reward me with great deals and interesting content about my particular hobby. However, I’m not sure I want you to market some diet pills to me just because I confessed to being worried about my weight on facebook to people I thought were my friends or if I uploaded some photos where I looked a bit podgy (which would be any photo of me).

Young people (and old people) read about their favourite celebs in magazines like Heat and Hello. Their facebook page is their chance for a bit of fame if they share what’s going on in their lives. They are copying what they see celebs do (or have done to them) in terms of publicity, reaching for their 15 minutes of fame.

So, I have adpated an old Cat Stevens song as a warning to young people who, in their search for internet celebrity, are not sufficiently wary of facebook:-

Oh, baby it’s a wired world,
It’s hard to get by just upon a smile.
Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wired world
I’ll always remember you just like a child, girl.

At least I will if you are not careful about the photos you upload to facebook.

Brand Loyalty and Boyle’s Law

Andrew Ehrenberg passed away this year. I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions and have him explain to me first hand his findings on brand loyalty. I never really understood it then and have still not entirely got my mind round it. Andrew applied the laws of physics to brands and in a study of over 100 fmcg brands in Europe, Japan and America proved something that none of us marketers wanted to believe, still don’t – that brand penetration and average purchase move in a constant relationship. Put in plain English, big brands are big because more people buy them and on average they buy more of them. Small brands are small because fewer people buy them and buy less of them.

“It is like Boyle’s Law, Mark, as the volume of a gas declines the pressure goes up in a constant relationship” he explained to me (I did not have the heart to point out I gave up Physics at the age of 13 years). But what causes the change, I asked? “Ah, that is for you clever marketers to find out!” he replied.

The implications of this struck me as staggering. For years I’d believed that most of marketing was designed either to build penetration or increase loyalty and that we could somehow manipulate these as separate objectives. His findings were clear – they work in tandem. If you make a brand stronger then both penetration and loyalty (in terms of how often/how much people buy) go up.

Over the subsequent years I was exposed to many marketing models that failed to take this into account. McKinsey have a funnel that dissects a brand into sub groups from aware to consider, to buy occasionally, to buy most often, which they use to define the specific marketing objectives for a brand – its opportunity to grow. Wrong according to Andrew Ehrenberg. Strengthen the brand and every one of these measures will rise.

At one level this makes sense. It is hard to think of any marketing activity which addresses only one aspect of the funnel. Even if you flight an ad that encourages people to try a brand for the first time it will also encourage some to use it more often. If you run a promotion that rewards heavy purchase it will get the attention of non-buyers and persuade them to try. But surely there must be different levels of effect that would cause a skew in Ehrenberg’s findings? He was certain that there were not – he had the data to prove it – unless there was some structural market anomaly. Unleaded petrol was just coming on the market at the time I met Andrew (tells you how long ago it was) and he used this as an example which could skew the results because the distribution of the new type of fuel was controlled artificially and patchy. It was, in economists’ terms, ‘an imperfect market’. But in most fmcg markets were brands are freely available and fair competition keeps prices in line (i.e. a more perfect market) Ehrenberg’s Law held true over time. Those last couple of words – ‘over time’ – are important. I am quite sure that in the short term, a month or so, certain marketing activity will disproportionately affect either penetration or loyalty but over the course of a year they effect will work their way through to either a stronger or weaker brand in the way Ehrenberg described.

During my time at SAB we focused hard on the nature of brand adoption (and ‘unadoption’) and loyalty, and I got heavily immersed in studying it from many different angles. This included a lot of data-based analysis building on Ehrenberg’s work but also ethnographic work (studying consumers’ behaviour in real time). We even looked at the differences in people’s learning styles from the findings of educationalists to see if we could segment the different ways people assimilate new information about brands. We studied the best circumstances in which to sample a beer brand – in a busy pub when the party is in full swing or when you had quieter groups of friends in the early evening. We found that if people were ‘out of their comfort zone’ for example in a new venue with an unfamiliar group of friends, it improved their receptiveness (in a lasting way) to new ideas and new brands. We looked at various conversion models and even developed one of our own. But I never felt we got to the ‘answer’ and I certainly never felt we fully took account of, let alone disproved, Ehrenbergs challenging empirical analysis and findings.

So I’m still thinking about it. Here are my latest thoughts.

The journey to loyalty is not a journey

At any one moment in time we can divide a brand into various usage/attitudinal groups:-

•    Blissfully unaware
•    Passively aware but don’t know much about it
•    Saliently aware – both know the brand and know something about it that makes it interesting/relevant/attractive.
•    Actively considering
•    Using occasionally
•    Using most often
•    Using exclusively and downright evangelical about it

You can look at a brand in this way – people have to fall into one, but not more than one, of these groups. BUT it is not a journey from “aware to loyal” with several neat steps along the way. You can go from blissfully unaware to evangelical in one brief moment.

There’s a difference between behavioural and attitudinal loyalty

Financial people only care about bevioural loyalty because that shows up on the P&L. If someone is buying a brand on more than 80% of their purchase occasions we can say they are behaviourally loyal. But they may or may not be attitudinally loyal – they may be buying out of indifference and/or inertia or they may be buying very deliberately because of their strong feelings towards the brand. Guess which is better in the long run?

Cheating only helps in the short term

It follows from the above that we can manipulate behavioural loyalty with short term incentives – a discount, a promotion. I’m not knocking this – if you can do that cost effectively and there is no competitive reaction it can be profitable. If you force trial and therefore force people to see how much better the brand is it can also be of value. But that is the point – you need to affect the attitudinal loyalty, the strength of relationship with the brand to make it so strong it will still be bought as often by as many people long after the discount ends.

We want to shift the demand curve

As Andrew Ehrenberg said, as marketers we need to figure out the best ways to create the difference in “volume and pressure’ in other words to strengthen the brand, in fact to shift the whole demand curve so that at any given price more people will consider, buy and buy more often. There are no short cuts to loyalty – it is a proxy for brand health and it takes time and effort.

I did not know Andrew Ehrenberg well but he struck me as a highly intelligent, decent and thoughtful man. He was a scientist and he enriched our understanding about marketing through the appliance of science. He injected some facts based on experimentation into a ‘marketing discipline’ that is often anything but.

Is the Internet Changing our Brains?

I have been involved in a debate about whether the internet has changed marketing. It began in an exchange between myself and Paul Feldwick in Market Leader, the UK Marketing Society’s journal, and then moved on-line. There have been, as we hoped, some great contributions, including one from Elen Lewis who referenced an article in The Guardian that features several very eminent scientists (and a novelist) debating whether and how the internet has changed our very brains. I was interested in this since a big part of my argument that marketing has fundamentally changed as a result of the internet is based on the fact that society and people have changed. To be able to show that our brains have changed is therefore a killer point.

The article is worth reading in its entirety and being given some quiet consideration rather than surfing this short post to get the gist – you will realize the relevance/irony of this recommendation if you do. However, if, as a child of the internet, it is gist you want then here it is. Yes the internet is changing our brains. Some argue that it is for the worse, some argue it is just different with pro’s and cons, others argue it is our choice whether or not we allow it to change our brains (reading more books would help us retain our intellectual reasoning apparently).

For me the most interesting comment in the Guardian piece comes from Ed Bullmore, Cambridge Professor of Psychiatry no less. He argues that the internet resembles a human brain and how it works and therefore we can learn a lot about how we think by studying it. He calls the internet “a prosthesis of our collective memory” that’s an artificial brain to you and me. I know extrapolation is a dangerous thing but it has struck me before that if, at some point in the near future (near being imminent in evolutionary terms) everything that has ever been written and conceived, everyone one of us, every artifact and idea is digitally coded and available on the internet, and if every person on the planet is uploading their thoughts and conversations in real time, and if there are search engines and social networks able to allow each and everyone of us to access and connect all of these things again in real time, that is in effect one global brain is it not? This sounds a bit far fetched I agree. So do the views of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Far from being shame-faced that community information has leaked out he believes that everything should be transparent and publically available. He thinks – this is really crazy – that the world would be a better place, we would all behave better, if there were no secrets, if we were all honest with each other. Actually there must be a flaw in this argument since I have only one brain and I’m not honest with myself.

Anyway, the fact is that the big brains agree the internet is changing our brains and how they function as well as how we interact in our global cyber society. I think that means marketing must be changed fundamentally since at its heart it is about influencing how people think, behave and choose, individually and collectively, to the commercial benefit of a business. In fact I’d say that was game, set and match Paul! I’d now like to move on to a debate about the cult of celebrity and its role in our slide into destructive global decadence (aka Paris Hilton will be the death of all of us).

Any takers?