The Social Animal (27 page)

Grocers know that the smell of baked goods stimulates shopping, so many bake their own bread from frozen dough on the premises each morning and then pump the bread smell into the store throughout the day. They also know that music sells goods. Researchers in Britain found that when French music was pumped into a store, sales of French wines skyrocketed. When German music was played, German wine sales grew.

At the shopping mall, low-volume stores are generally near the exits. People haven’t yet made the transition from the outside world to the inner shopping world so they barely notice those first few establishments. In department stores, the women’s shoe section is generally next to the women’s cosmetics section (while the clerk is going back to find the right size shoe, bored customers are likely to wander over and find some makeup they might want to try later).

Consumers frequently believe products placed on the right side of a display are of higher quality than those on the left. Timothy Wilson and Richard Nisbett put four identical pairs of panty hose on a table and asked consumers to rate them. The farther to the right a pair was on the table, the higher the rating the women gave it. The rightward-most pair was rated highest by 40 percent of the customers, the next one by 31 percent, the next by 17 percent, and the leftward-most by 12 percent. All of the customers but one (a psychology student) denied that location made any difference in their selection, and none noticed that the products were exactly the same.

At restaurants, people eat more depending on how many people they are dining with. People eating alone eat least. People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they do at home. People dining in a party of four eat 75 percent more, and people dining with seven or more eat 96 percent more.

Marketing people also realize that people have two sets of tastes, one for stuff they want to use now and one for stuff they want to use later. For example, when researchers asked customers what movies they would like to rent to watch later, they generally pick art films such as
The Piano
. When they are asked what movie they want to watch tonight, they pick blockbusters such as
Avatar
.

Even people shopping for major purchases often don’t know what they want. Realtors have a phrase, “Buyers lie,” because the house many people describe at the beginning of their search is nothing like the one they actually prefer and buy. Builders know that many home decisions are made in the first seconds upon walking in the door. A California builder, Capital Pacific Homes, structured its high-end spec houses so that upon entering the customer would see the Pacific Ocean through the windows on the main floor, and then the pool through an open stairway leading to the lower level. The instant view of water on both levels helped sell these $10 million homes. Later cogitation was much less important.

Erica loved these kinds of hidden patterns. (Like most people, she thought they applied to others but of course not to herself.) She figured she could build her consulting business by gathering data about these unconscious behavioral patterns, especially the ones tied to cultural differences, and then she could sell the information back to companies.

She began collecting information on African American shoppers, Hispanic shoppers, coastal and heartland shoppers. She was especially intrigued by the difference between upscale and downscale shoppers. For all of human history the rich had worked fewer hours than the poor, but over the past generation that trend had been inverted. Attitudes about leisure had become inverted, too. While lower-middle class shoppers wanted video games and movies for the weekends, so they could relax, the rich wanted books and exercise regimens, so they could improve.

Erica developed a collection of analyses about these consumer trends and was ready to pitch her material to potential clients. From the first, building this business was harder than she anticipated. She wrote to companies she thought she could help, called executives she’d met, hounded their assistants. Very few got back to her. During her first few months on her own, Erica’s personality changed. Until now, she had had the usual array of human needs: food, water, sleep, affection, relaxation, and so on. Now she had only one need: clients. Every thought, every dinner conversation, and every chance meeting was evaluated on that basis. She was anxious about being productive each day, but the more anxious she was, the less productive she became. In addition, she fell into an anxiety spiral. She would concentrate on getting enough sleep each night, but the more she concentrated on sleep, the less she could actually get. She worked doggedly to absorb new information, but the more frantically she strived to absorb new knowledge, the less she actually remembered.

Erica had always been an owl. Most people are alert in the morning. About 10 percent are at their most alert around noon. But about 20 percent of the adult population is most alert after six p.m., the owls. But during this period of her life, Erica’s evening alertness turned into all-night insomnia. Time changed shape. It had once flowed at a peaceful, steady pace. Now it was a furious current roaring by. When she pulled into a gas station, she silently calculated how many e-mails she could send on her BlackBerry while her tank was filling up. During every pause before an elevator she brought her phone out of her pocket and was texting. She ate at her desk so that she could e-mail while she chewed. Television and movies dropped out of her life. Her neck began to hurt and her back was sore. In the morning she’d stare at furious scribbles she had written to herself the night before, completely unable to decipher them.

She did things she never thought she would do—cold-calling potential clients and then silently swallowing their dismissive disdain. She’d started this business with dreams of success, but once it was under way she was primarily motivated by fear of failure. It was the thought of the looks she would get from friends and colleagues if her business failed that drove her onward. It was the prospect of having to tell her mother that she’d gone bankrupt.

She’d been a driven person since the Academy, but now she became a detail fanatic. She presented potential clients with little binders of her ideas and proposals. If a page was out of line, if one of the plastic spiral things was bent, she went to Code Red. The rest of the world might be lackadaisical, but not she.

And Erica believed in her product. She believed there were hidden currents of knowledge and, if she could only get her clients to see them, she would change the world. She would give people deeper ways to perceive reality, new powers to serve and succeed. But there were a few roadblocks in her way. When she talked about culture, her potential clients had no idea what she meant. They knew vaguely that culture was important. They used the phrase “corporate culture” with reverence. But still the concept had no concreteness to them. They had been trained to master spreadsheets and numbers. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to take sociological or anthropological categories seriously. To them it was like molding air.

Furthermore, when Erica spoke about different ethnic cultures they broke out in hives. It was one thing for a Chinese-Latina woman to talk about shopping preferences of blacks and whites, urban Jews and rural Protestants. But the mostly white executives had been trained by a generation of consciousness-raising to never, never, never talk in these terms. Never make a generalization about a group of people, never make observations about a minority group, and for God’s sake, never make any comments of this sort in public! That was career suicide. They could laugh when Chris Rock made ethnic jokes. They could listen as Erica noted cultural differences. But they themselves could never, ever go there without facing racism charges, discrimination suits, and boycotts. When Erica asked them to think in ethnic and cultural terms, they had the sudden urge to flee the room in terror.

Erica also had the misfortune to launch her company at the high-water mark of the neuromappers. These were glamorous neurologists who went from business conference to business conference with multicolor fMRI brain scans, promising to unlock the secret synaptic formula to selling toilet paper or energy bars.

The typical neuromapper was a six-foot, shaved-head, cool academic who traipsed into marketing conventions in a leather jacket, jeans, and boots, carrying a motorcycle helmet as though he’d just come in from a neuroscientists’ revival of
Grease
. He’d be followed around by a camera crew for Finnish television, making a documentary of his life and ideas, and he’d whisper his faux intimacies to his clients while covering the lavalier microphone that was forever clipped to his T-shirt.

His PowerPoint presentation would be polished like fine chrome. He’d start with a series of optical illusions, like the one about the two tabletops that seem totally different but which are exactly the same size and shape, or the picture of the old lady that suddenly flips in the mind’s eye and becomes a beautiful woman in a hat. By the time he was done with the optical illusions the businesspeople were practically wetting their pants in wonder. This was even cooler than the free key chains and tote bags they’d gotten in the vendor area outside.

Then he’d flip on the fMRI scans and start talking about the left- and right-brain differences and his theories of reptilian-brain impulses. Somewhere deep inside this spiel there was some serious science, but it was submerged under layers of pizzazz. The brain scans were awesome. He’d explain that from the top down the brain looks like a rounder version of Ohio. Then he’d get excited as the scans would roll by. Look, a sip of Pepsi makes the front of the brain--around Cleveland, Akron, and Canton--light up. Look! A Frito Lay chip makes the area around Mansfield light up, with a little activity also in Columbus! Look what happens when you give people an image of FedEx. Dayton turns orange! Toledo is red!

A breakfast cereal really should be exciting the medial frontal cortex, he’d declare. Commercials with LeBron James should set the ventral premotor cortex on fire! You want to lodge your brand, he tells everyone, in the ventral striatum! You’ve got to get the client emotionally involved!

This was science with sex appeal! This was not Erica’s vague talk about culture. This was colors on a screen produced by multimillion-dollar machinery that you can see and measure. The neuromappers had their exclusive NeuroFocus Insight System or their NeuroFramework Product Strategy services. They could pinpoint the pure brain essences that would unlock the selling code! Well, of course the executives loved it. Of course every time Erica went in to pitch her services she hit a wall of apathy. Her potential clients wanted somebody who could paint their dorsolateral prefrontal activation bright green! Erica was out of phase with the marketing fads.

One day Erica was pitching her expertise to the
CEO
of an autoparts company. He interrupted her after about ten minutes. “You know, I respect you. We’re the same,” he said, “but you are boring me. I just don’t relate to what you are offering.”

Erica couldn’t think of any rejoinder.

“Why don’t you try a different approach? Instead of telling me what you’re offering, why don’t you ask me what I want?” Erica wondered if he was putting the moves on her. But he continued. “Ask me what makes me unhappy. Ask me what keeps me up at night. Ask me what part of my job I wish somebody would take care of for me. It’s not about you. It’s about me.”

Erica realized this was no pickup line. It was a life lesson. She didn’t make a sale to that guy. She left his office confused, her mind jumbled. But the meeting did change everything. From now on her approach was “I’ll do whatever you need.” She would find a way to use her tools to solve whatever problem the clients threw at her. She would come at them and she would say, “What do you want me to do? How can I serve?”

Erica took herself out for a walk one day and thought this thing through. She was failing to sell cultural segmentation. She didn’t want to join the ranks of the neuromappers because she noticed that the advice they derived from their science was actually quite banal. What could she possibly offer?

It never occurred to her to quit. As Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania has argued, people who succeed tend to find one goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin. People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them. School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever.

Erica figured she needed to find some field of expertise she could bring to her client’s problems. She needed some body of knowledge that related to her interest in culture and deep decision making, but which also was palatable in the marketplace. She had to find a language to describe consumer psychology that businesspeople could understand—something familiar and scientific. And that’s how she came upon behavioral economics.

Over the previous decade a group of economists had worked to apply the insights of the cognitive revolution to their own field. Their chief argument, which appealed to Erica a great deal, was that classical economics got human nature partially or largely wrong. The human being imagined by classical economics is smooth, brilliant, calm, and perpetually unastonished by events. He surveys the world with a series of uncannily accurate models in his head, anticipating what will come next. His memory is incredible; he is capable of holding a myriad of decision-making options in his mind, and of weighing the trade-offs involved in each one. He knows exactly what he wants and never flip-flops between two contradictory desires. He seeks to maximize his utility (whatever that is). His relationships are all contingent, contractual, and ephemeral. If one relationship is not helping him maximize his utility, then he trades up to another. He has perfect self-control and can restrain impulses that may prevent him from competing. He doesn’t get caught up in emotional contagions or groupthink, but makes his own decisions on the basis of incentives.