The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Allow me to add a little to the discussion, some more information on how we are prisoners to language...

(and I admit now that I'm going to have some fun with this)

Human thought processes aren't designed for analytics in the way the word is used today (definitely not the way the word is implied in "web analytics"). Give most humans lots of data or information and their eyes glaze over, their minds go numb. What human thought processes are well designed to do is understand what science calls "anecdotal information" and what business calls "case studies".

This lack of ability (at least without training) is an example of where heuristics demonstrates its strength and where Occam's Razor fails -- sometimes the simplest solution isn't the correct one and touches into a field called "economic psychology" (amazing the specialties there are, isn't it?).

Science works kind of like this: there's data, you create a theory that explains the data, you test the theory by doing an experiment that should create similar data, you lather-rinse-repeat the theory-experiment process until the error between theory and experiment is acceptable (the "±2db" people often hear me talk about. What some people call "±2s").

And this is where being a prisoner to language comes in. The theory-experiment process requires people to think, not do...or at least to think before they do. Having managed labs, I can tell you that there's lots of thinking before doing because (contrary to opinion) there's not a lot of money for scientific research so you have to think before you do a lot. Doing and doing incorrectly depletes your budget rapidly and is hence a no-no.

You'd think that companies investing in solutions -- any solutions -- would like to see the data behind the solutions.

This is rarely the case. Any solution report that doesn't have bulleted suggestions immediately following the cover page is doomed to go unread, it's suggestions unheeded in most cases. Drawing from my own experience, the more complex the science, the more business people want you to distill the findings to one or two or at the most three elements.

Allow me to share an anecdote that demonstrates this. In NextStage's early days we talked to VC. One incident that stands out was talking to a fellow who told us he didn't believe Evolution Technology (ET) did what we claimed. Fine, we showed him the proof of concepts, detailed scientific experiments that demonstrated yes, ET was doing what we claimed.

He barely looked at the proofs. Instead he looked at me and said he still didn't believe it. I thought for a second and asked, "It doesn't really matter how much proof we give you or what independent studies we show you, you just don't believe ET does what we claim, correct?"

He didn't hesitate. "Correct."

I gathered my things and walked out. Oh, alright, I made a few comments first. Most of them in Italian, most of them I learned from my grandfather and father when a cow stepped on their foot or something similar.

<RAMBLE>
Sometime I should do a presentation on "Getting Your Business Through the Early Days".
</RAMBLE>

The above example also illustrates the difference between American and Canadian audiences. Americans tended to call me "arrogant" (also obnoxious and disliked). Canadians tended to call me "confident".

This plays directly into Pioneering versus Colonial thinking. Colonists huddle together for mutual defense against the outsider and define anything new or different as a threat. Pioneers expect to encounter new things and are slow to respond except to direct and obvious threat. IE, the latter will think before it acts, the former will act before it thinks.

And now we bring this back even more to scientific thinking versus anecdotal thinking and economic psychology. Most people reading this post will recognize and accept (even if they don't necessarily agree with) what I've written. More people will nod knowingly at the anecdote above about the VC. I could have presented all the data we collected during our early days that demonstrated our travails (the presentation I suggested above. Yep, it was so fascinating we turned it into a research project. Got one of our most used Language Engines out of it, the RWB Language Engine).

However, the true majority of people will respond to the anecdote much more intimately (ie, have a direct emotional response) than they will to the science because the anecdote is (you guessed it) more intimate, more personal, provides more connections between "me and thee". It puts a face on things, it makes the situation human, far easier to understand and because of these two far more believable than not.

Anecdotal thinking also allows someone to completely ignore the science and focus on similarities and differences that have no basis in addressing the original problem. For example, company A is shown how web analytics can create financial benefit. Lots of numbers, lots of data. Company A ignores that and asks "What is company B doing?"

It won't matter that companies A and B are in completely different markets addressing completely different audiences with completely different products. All that matters is that company B is Toronto based and company A is Toronto based, their websites have similar looks&feels, the CEOs play golf at the same club, ... It especially won't matter that company B's solution won't work for company A.

This is the power of anecdotal thinking. It allows humans to ignore obvious errors in reasoning and logic and why case studies and recommendations have a great deal more meaning than all the science in the world when it comes to making business cases (and this is true for all but a few borders you may be crossing).

And what about economic psychology? One lesson from economic psychology is a recognition of personality types that only learn via pain, ie, they have to make the same or similar mistakes repeatedly (repeatedly!) before they'll consider something new. The truth is that most people get wired this way. We are trained to be cautious, it's not a part of our natural wiring.

Babies crawl and then walk all over the place with a complete disregard for how dangerous the world is. They explore everything because their brains are hungry for information. This experiential information (ie, "doing") is what creates the mind and later the personalities we recognize they have. Part of that exploration involves the parent or guardian saying "No!" and sometimes reinforcing the "No!" with a firm pat on the butt.

Scientists, me thinks, never got enough pats on the butt to remove that original wiring because scientists explore all the time. It's what they do. Perhaps the pats on the butt created the need for data to analyze where as in others they simply removed the original wiring.

Anyway, the desire to gather data was replaced (in most cases) by a desire to think anecdotally, ie, cautiously. Being cautious helps us survive therefore to heck with logic and science, give me anecdotes each and every time!

<RAMBLE, part 2>
I'm not good at bridging the gap between anecdotal and scientific thinking, me thinks. This is evidenced by this post, by my guest posts on Susan Bratton's blog and such. I can provide a few bullets, a set of action items, and usually only after I've numbed you with the research that led up to those suggestions. NextStage currently has 80+ reports in its website tracking system. What's the most used one? The "Suggestions Report" that lists Critical, Important and Desirable things to do to improve online performance. "Those other ones are real interesting, Joe, but they don't tell me what to do. Just give me the Suggestions Report and we'll ask for the others when we're creating our internal reports for in-house use."
</RAMBLE, part 2>

The problem with anecdotal thinking is that we can be fooled easily. Everyone from magicians to confidence hustlers exploits this. You would think that a tendency towards caution would make us less likely to be fooled, yes?

No, whether colonist or pioneer any ploy to caution will be internalized first and regardless of any scientific evidence contrary.

The anecdote -- because we've acquired the wiring -- always wins.

(more to follow)

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