Brand Distortionists: How a vocal minority make it harder to know what your consumers really want

With the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders, we have become aware of the phenomenon of the political, noisy minority. They are the extreme brush we use to paint those even loosely associated with this extreme group. If you lean right, you are assumed to be wearing a MAGA hat and filled with hatred for poor people and immigrants. And if you lean slightly left, you are assumed to be a socialist (if not communist) who wants to cripple the economy and turn over all power and means of production to the government.

In reality of course, neither of these are true. And actually I think the exposure of this bias to the extreme in politics has gained a lot of traction in recent years. This will always be an uphill battle as long as the media continues to be incentivised to only cover the extreme voices on either side, but most people I talk to are aware of this issue in some form. A great site The Hidden Tribes of America (a project by More in Common) has taken a deep look at this problem:

However, working in marketing I see this same phenomenon in the voices we focus on from our consumers. Those who write in to say how much they love your product (or how much they hate it) are truly the outliers. These are almost always people with so much time on their hands that they are spending it contacting a company to share their opinions or they are the rare person who really spends a significant portion of their day thinking about you and your product. And yet, because they are the only ones we hear from, we assume this must be how most consumers feel. Not only do we then form our idea of what our consumers think based on the vocal minority, but we make important decisions to cater to this noisy subgroup.

Just as there are political extremists, there are also brand extremists. A small minority who are fiercely loyal to your brand (or fiercely loyal to your competitor). However, unlike political extremists, these people don’t get picked up by the news—they get focused on by the marketing department.

Marketers and journalists are in the business of telling stories. But more than that they are in the business of telling compelling stories, which in general come from the extremes. “Our consumers love the new flavour we introduced” or “our consumers couldn’t live without X, Y, or Z.” The damage of this distortion is never clearer than when you happen to come across somebody who has purchased your product and you ask them about their experience expecting some detailed analysis of the pros and cons and what it means to them and all you get is something like, “yeah I think it was on sale, but…um…I like how it smells?”

It’s similar to meeting someone who voted in favour of Brexit and asking them why, expecting a 10 minute scree on immigration and Muslims. What you usually get though is something like “I just feel like decisions about the UK should be made in the UK,” and the polls actually seem to support this. Agree or disagree with this, it’s not the radical view most would expect.

It’s not clear how this kind of distortion in politics will be fixed in the future as long as the incentives for news outlets are based on clicks and viewership numbers (which I’ve written at length about in the past). But in our marketing departments, we do have the power to pay a little less attention to the noisy few and instead gather data on the majority in order to more accurately address the needs of our consumers.

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For more (I mean A LOT more) on the political polarisation problem, I recommend checking out Tim Urban’s latest blog series The Story of Us

Blue Flowers or: The Innumeracy of News

Originally published on Medium.com

Imagine you are looking out on a field of a endless yellow flowers. These flowers are always yellow, but there is a genetic mutation that causes one in every million of these flowers to turn blue.

Now imagine you continue walking past the field to where your grandmother lives. She is old and can’t leave the house anymore but she remembers the field of yellow flowers. She asks you to pick some flowers to bring back to her so she can smell them. So you walk back to the field and begin picking flowers when you come upon a blue flower.

It’s shocking and unexpected. It’s the exception. So you pick it and proceed to bring her a beautiful bunch of yellow flowers with one blue flower.

She is so excited to see the flowers and smell them and she can imagine the field you described. But then you show her the blue flower. She is intrigued by it and can’t look away. She even inadvertently drops the yellow flowers you brought her. She asks if you can bring her more blue flowers.

You’re a good grandchild, so you do.

And every day you go back out, looking for more blue flowers and each day you return with a flower. Sometimes it takes all day, but you always bring back the blue flowers because they make her so happy.

Soon she starts referring to the field as the “field of blue flowers.” But you feel strange, knowing that your grandmother is imagining a field of blue flowers where in fact, there is a field of yellow flowers.

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We are drawn to outliers and oddities. They excite us. But this excitement also moves our benchmark for what is normal. It skews how we see the world and how often we think these events are happening because we are easily able conjure up an example. But this is exactly the type of exceptional information that news outlets and journalists bring us on a daily basis.

It’s an entire industry that depends on brushing aside all the yellow flowers to get to the blue one first. Or more commonly, “if it bleeds, it leads.” When someone is asked why they watch the news they generally say to “stay informed” or to know “what’s happening in the world.” But is that really true?

Let me be clear now, the consumers of news media and the creators of it play an equal role in the misinformation. I don’t mean fake news misinformation. I am not claiming that the content itself is misleading. Rather, I am referring to the disproportionate presentation of sensational material that leads to a perception of the world that is highly inaccurate.

They brought us a blue flower and we loved it. Now we collect them, and when they try to bring us yellow flowers, we turn them away. There are entire companies made of professional blue flower hunters. They know where they are likely to grow and how to ask the right juicy questions (this is where my metaphor starts to break down, if it hasn’t already).

But is a car bomb in Syria what’s “happening in the world?” Or is it just what’s happening on that street in Syria? Is the Twitter feed of a certain pumpkin coloured US President “keeping you informed?” Or is it just junk food for the mind? Is this stream of adrenaline pumped headlines making us better, or is it letting us ignore the parts of our own lives that we would rather not deal with?

These are questions I asked myself last year when I decided to delete all of the news apps off my phone. I’ve stopped watching or reading anything other than a weekly print edition of the Economist. I spend an hour or two reading it and then I put it away. The last year has been by far my most productive and happiest. Some have argued, “you have to stay informed!” or “how are you going to know if a nuclear bomb is headed right towards you?!” (the last one was a real argument presented to me). First of all, if I’m about to get nuked, I would prefer to spend my last moments doing what I am doing, not freaking out. Second of all, I question the assumption that I must “stay informed.”

I don’t believe that the way we have the most impact is by collecting the most information. I believe each of us have the most impact on those in our immediate area and in the situations where our skills can actually make a difference. There are too many problems in the world for you to worry about all of them. And way too many for you to think you can fix all of them without being a complete egomaniac.

But there are problems around you everyday that you could do something about. Things that you think are so small that they aren’t real problems because they don’t involve a war or a natural disaster. They are the yellow flowers. They are the ones that you walk past every day because you’re waiting for a blue flower. A “cause” that will make you a hero and really make a difference. But the truth is, blue flowers are one in a million for a reason.

So start picking some yellow flowers. Start dealing with your problems and the problems in your community. They might get ignored by the newspapers and media conglomerates, but they don’t have to be ignored by us.