Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?

Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2007
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781418525590
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Business

Evolving from the premise that customers have always behaved more like cats than Pavlov's dogs, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? examines how emerging media have undermined the effectiveness of prevailing mass marketing models. At the same time, emerging media have created an unprecedented opportunity for businesses to redefine how they communicate with customers by leveraging the power of increasingly interconnected media channels.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg don't simply explain this shift in paradigm; Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? introduces Persuasion Architecture™ as the synthetic model that provides business with a proven context for rethinking customers and retooling marketers in a rewired market.

Readers will learn:

• Why many marketers are unprepared for today's increasingly fragmented, in-control, always-on audience that makes pin-point relevance mandatory
• How interactivity has changed the nature of marketing by extending its reach into the world of sales, design, merchandizing, and customer relations
• How Persuasion Architecture™ allows businesses to create powerful, multi-channel persuasive systems that anticipate customer needs
• How Persuasion Architecture™ allows businesses to measure and optimize the return on investment for every discreet piece of that persuasive system

"There's some big thinking going on here-thinking you will need if you want to take your work to the next level. 'Typical, not average' is just one of the ideas inside that will change the way you think about marketing." ?Seth Godin, Author, All Marketers Are Liars

"Are your clients coming to you armed with more product information than you or your sales team know? You need to read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? to learn how people are buying in the post-Internet age so you can learn how to sell to them." ?Tom Hopkins, Master Sales Trainer and Author, How to Master the Art of Selling

"These guys really 'get it.' In a world of know-it-all marketing hypesters, these guys realize that it takes work to persuade people who aren't listening. They've connected a lot of the pieces that we all already know-plus a lot that we don't. It's a rare approach that recognizes that the customer is in charge and must be encouraged and engaged on his/her own terms, not the sellers. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? takes apart the persuasion process, breaks down the steps and gives practical ways to tailor your approaches to your varying real customers in the real world. This book is at a high level that marketers better hope their competitors will be too lazy to implement." ?George Silverman, Author, The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth

"We often hear that the current marketing model is broken-meaning the changes in customers, media, distribution, and even the flatness of the world make current practices no longer relevant. Yet few have offered a solution. This book recognizes the new reality in which we operate and provides a path for moving forward. The authors do an outstanding job of using metaphors to help make Persuasion Architecture clear and real-life examples to make it come alive. Finally, someone has offered direction for how to market in this new era where the customer is in control." ?David J. Reibstein, William Stewart Woodside Professor, Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and former Executive Director, Marketing Science Institute

"If you want to learn persistence, get a cat. If you want to learn marketing, get this book. It's purrfect." ?Jeffrey Gitomer, Author, The Little Red Book of Selling

CHAPTER ONE:

Dogs, Cats,
and Marketing

It must have been one of those “light bulb moments.” A Russian scientist ambles through his laboratory one day, thoughts of digestive secretions on his mind. Idly he watches a lab-coated assistant lean down to pet one of the dogs.

The dog starts drooling, and this routine sight stops the scientist in his tracks. Assistant pets dog, dog salivates (the involuntary, slobbery confirmation the dog is thinking about food). Yet there is no food in sight. Aha! The assistant always wears his lab coat when he feeds the dog. The dog sees the lab coat and thinks food is on the way.

Most of us, faced with a drooling dog, would simply shake our heads and reach for the nearest paper towel. Not Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who worked with dogs to help him understand the human digestive system.

To get a handle on the relationship between stimulus and response, Pavlov replaced the lab coat with a sound and began an investigation into the world of conditional reflexes. The rest is history. Pavlov won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his medical inquiries into the physiology of digestion, but he is best remembered as the man who got dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell.¹

So what does dog drool have to do with marketing?

Since the time of Pavlov, marketers have been “bell ringers”, and customers have played the role of the drooling dog. Bells ring everywhere— there are even ads in urinals—but today fewer customers are panting and whining for a bite. Even worse for marketers, many customers simply find all that bell ringing annoying.

What changed? The bell? The dogs? Why aren’t customers responding? And what can marketers do about that?

Cooking up a conditioned response

A conditioned response is a simple form of branding, and you can’t create a conditioned response in the blink of an eye. That’s why marketers insist on creating the most salient ads possible, then broadcasting those to as many people as possible as frequently as possible.

Here is the recipe for “Customers a la Pavlov”:

1. Find your dog and keep him a bit hungry. This takes time.

2. Ring your bell, and offer the dog meat. ²Dogs love meat; meat is salient. If you try to associate bell ringing with sawdust, the dog will simply ignore you. No self-respecting dog drools for sawdust!

3. Repeat step #2 over and over and over again. When “bell” becomes synonymous with “food” in the canine’s gray matter, you can ring the bell, withhold the food, and the dog still salivates.

4. Conditioning can wear off. To keep your dog conditioned, repeat this process frequently.

Modern psychology considers Pavlov’s behaviorist experiment an example of “classic conditioning,” the goal of which is to instill an association between stimuli (usually external ones like the bell) so that encountering one will bring the other to mind.³

Far-reaching implications

In 1909, the implications of Pavlov’s results came to the attention of American behaviorist John Broadus Watson, then on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. In 1930,Watson wrote:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts, and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary, and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.⁴

Watson gained notoriety through his “Little Albert” experiments, in which he conditioned a fear response in an eleven-month-old boy, using a white rat and a loud sound.⁵ Forced to leave academia when he was caught in a sex scandal involving the student who assisted him in this research,Watson turned his attention to advertising and went to work for J.Walter Thompson (now JWT):

. . . where, using techniques from his behavioral psychology, he showed that people’s preferences between rival products were not based on their sensory qualities but on their associations. He went on to develop the selling of products like Maxwell House Coffee, Pond’s Cold Cream, Johnson’s Baby Powder and Odorono (one of the first deodorants). By 1924 he was one of the four vice-presidents of this very successful agency.⁶

“So here we have J.B. Watson,” wrote Chris Locke in Chief Blogging Officer, “father of American behaviorism, packing up all he knows about eliciting the Pavlovian slobber reaction, and wholesaling it to Madison Avenue.”⁷

Through men like Pavlov and Watson, the seeds for over half a century’s worth of marketing practice were planted, then nourished by the “science” of behaviorism and its successful application in the spheres of marketing.

“Tom” foolery

Pavlov used dogs because their digestive systems are similar to those of humans. As all his equipment was set up to accommodate dogs, Pavlov carried out his conditional reflex experiments on dogs.⁸

We suspect Pavlov would have had a harder time—and wonder what it might have meant to the development of behaviorist marketing practice— had he been working with cats. You can classically condition a response in many creatures, but the ease depends in large part on the nature of your subject and the reinforcement you use.

One basic difference between cats and dogs is motivation.⁹ Centuries of cat and dog humor captures the stereotypes: A dog wants to please you; a cat couldn’t care less. Dogs are devoted and loving and selfless. Cats are aloof, indifferent, and self-indulgent. Dogs are social and act in ways that maintain and support the social order. Cats are solitary and act in ways that benefit themselves.

Cat Haiku

The food in my bowl
Is old, and more to the point
Contains no tuna.

Most problems can be
Ignored. The more difficult
Ones can be slept through.

Am I in your way?
You seem to have it backwards:
This pillow’s taken.¹⁰

Yes, a cat may come running when she hears you going for the can opener, and with enough effort you can teach her to roll over on command some percentage of the time. Ultimately, though, her engagement with you lasts only as long as she wants it to last. A cat is not out to please you; she’s in it for herself.

She is not, and never will be, a dog.

Consumer branding: calling all cats

Early marketers, supported by Pavlov’s research and studies with human subjects, attempted to “prove” that when businesses rang the right bell the right number of times, they could command desire and behavior in their audience through branding alone. Early successes helped them feel advertising gave them control over their audiences.

When the available advertising media choices were limited and communities were more localized, people’s exposure to alternative experiences was restricted. It seemed possible that this theoretical control, or behavior-centeredness, of marketing was the key. Customers did, indeed, appear to salivate to marketing’s bells and responded by buying the most heavily marketed goods and services.

Few anticipated the full effect of blossoming media options on the behaviorist marketing models. Even as late as the mid-1980s, people looked upon burgeoning media—broadcast and cable television and radio—as growing vehicles for delivering messages to even larger audiences who were predisposed to “devour information and constantly clamor for more.”¹¹ Expanding media markets seemed to offer brilliant opportunities to ring better bells for increasingly more dogs.

Even a casual reading of a newspaper’s business section, with headlines that herald the death of mass-marketing and advertising, reveals the opportunities haven’t played out the way we’d hoped.

To everyone’s disappointment, emerging media are shattering behaviorist marketing tenets. Businesses are not in control of the strings; they can command neither desire nor response. Customers now have access to an unprecedented amount of information and can communicate any time and place they please. As media fragments, so does the “mass” in mass-marketing.

The window that emerging media has opened for us reveals a personal-experience economy, in which customers are in control. Brand is defined in customers’ minds by their personal experiences with a particular product or service. Attentive only to the information that matters to them, customers are behaving a lot more like cats than like Pavlov’s dogs.

Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing. Marketers must now reach beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic and extend themselves into the more intimate world of sales and customer relations. They are now responsible for creating powerful “persuasive systems” that anticipate and model customer needs, personalize information and processes to meet those needs, and then measure the return on investment for every discrete process in that system.

Technology may evolve at a pace that leaves us breathless, but the essential qualities of human behavior aren’t nearly that transitory. The road may have changed, but those traveling on the road haven’t.

We are not, and have never been, the metaphoric equivalent of Pavlov’s dogs.

Actually, when it comes to consumer behavior, we’ve always been like cats. All it took was a little...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Murray Gaylord, Yahoo! Inc.
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Dogs, Cats, and Marketing
• Chapter Two: Experiencing the Brand
• Chapter Three: Friction and Customer Experience
• Chapter Four: Why Marketing Is Simple But Hard
• Chapter Five: Marketers Out of Control
• Chapter Six: Customers in Control
• Chapter Seven: How Customers Buy
• Chapter Eight: Maintaining Persuasive Momentum
• Chapter Nine: Marketing and Sales Collide
• Chapter Ten: The Design of Persuasive Systems
• Chapter Eleven: A Web of Interactivity
• Chapter Twelve: Brands Cross Channels
• Chapter Thirteen: Insights and Customer Data
• Chapter Fourteen: Personalization or “Personalization”
• Chapter Fifteen: Introducing Personas
• Chapter Sixteen: Uncovering the Knowable
• Chapter Seventeen: Disclosing the Necessary
• Chapter Eighteen: Mapping Business Topology
• Chapter Nineteen: The Topology of a Sale
• Chapter Twenty: The Human Operating System
• Chapter Twenty-One: Choosing Personas
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Bringing Personas to Life
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Architecture Metaphor
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Wireframing As an Interactivity Map
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Architecting a Persuasion Scenario
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Storyboarding and Prototyping the Scenarios
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Accountable Marketing
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Persuasion Architecture: A Six-Step Process
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Celebrating Your Cats’Meows
• Notes