Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert
Essentially, marketing is about convincing people that our product or service will satisfy a buyer’s needs or desires better than another’s. We help buyers imagine how their lives will be shaped by it; how they can use it to take control of their futures, and be happier. The problem is, people are terrible at recognizing what works best to bring happiness. Why do humans fail miserably at predicting or even recalling the extent to which things and events affect personal well-being?
What BARQ Says
In his book Stumbling
On Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, points
out our inability to either recall the past or imagine the future with any
reliable degree of accuracy. In fact, the studies he cites detail how our eyes
and brains conspire in an effort to feed our egos and achieve gratification,
while effectively diminishing our happiness. Consequently, those who make decisions
based on the personal recall and predictions of others may be using extremely
faulty input. This puts a new light on focus groups!
It is puzzling to me why marketing students graduate without having taken psychology. The marketer who lacks a good understanding of what drives desire and influences a buyer’s decision will likely market their wares based on:
- Experience, betting that history will repeat itself; or worse, that successes were the sole result of marketing. (Given the high rate of new product failures, marketing based on experience with other products or markets is a gamble — every financial planner warns that past experience is not a reliable indicator of future returns);
- Lots of test marketing (lots of guessing). Testing is a great way to eliminate under-performing approaches, but a slow and costly way to isolate a good idea;
- Intuition (one big guess). Intuition works consistently for only geniuses and the extremely lucky;
- Anecdotal testimony (stories from sales personnel and engineers); or,
- Focus group data (group guessing).
The glorified focus group has long been employed as a means for determining what to develop and how to market it. Stumbling On Happiness uses a wide variety of studies in cognition, philosophy, behavior, and psychology to make the point that people are extremely poor at predicting what will make them happy, or how happy an event, product, or experience will make them. Gilbert cites studies that demonstrate how our past experiences prevent us from noticing changes when they take place — sometimes immediately, and literally right in front of our eyes. Moreover, when asked to recall a specific event, our brains resurrect a few stored bits of information about that particular experience, then “fill in” most of the details with data from similar experiences as well as information gathered since the event.
Authentic False Testimony
In one study,
Gilbert describes two groups who were shown a series of photos depicting a
traffic accident (page 79). The moderator then separated the groups but queried
the members of Group 1 only, including a question that asked if the subject
car had been passed by another vehicle while at the stop sign. Then both groups
were shown two photos depicting the subject car: one at a stop sign, the other
at a yield sign. The groups were asked to identify which of two photos they
remembered seeing in the original series. A full 80 percent of those in Group
1 selected the stop sign, but over 90 percent of the other group correctly
chose the yield. “Clearly, the question changed the volunteers’ memories
of their earlier experience,” Gilbert states. This indicates that our
brains “reweave” rather than “retrieve” memories.
Other studies indicate error rates up to 50 percent when eyewitnesses are asked to identify people they saw only once for a short time. Their ability is further diminished while under stress. The brain’s “filling in trick,” as Gilbert describes it, erroneously serves to make witnesses even more certain of their recollection. Consequently, their false confidence only makes the testimony more credible to a typical jury. That’s a frightening thought if you are facing false conviction based primarily on eyewitness testimony — particularly when news media, police and prosecutors have so many opportunities to make deposits to the witness’ memory banks.
Selective Selection
The book
also lends support to the common sales practice of including two types of details
about a product: those that arouse a buyer’s fears as well as those that
are attractive. (At SELMARQ, we call them German Shepherds and Golden Retrievers.)
If buyers are cautious or fearful, they notice features that offer protection.
If confident, they appreciate the benefits of performance and beauty. Gilbert
notes, “…when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes
of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative…” (page
100). This tendency can make a significant difference in survey results, depending
on how the question is asked.
Manufactured Mirth
The ‘50s
decade was America’s happiest, or so contends Bill Bryson, author of The
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir. He credits the abundance
and prosperity that followed WWII, when Americans could easily obtain all the
things that were unavailable during the depression of the ‘30s and the
rationing of the ’40s. Because we could produce and purchase anything
we needed, we began upgrading to more and better than we needed. As productivity
increased in the ‘60s, Americans bought more instead of working less
because buying made us happy in the ‘50s. That began what Gilbert calls
consumerism’s super-replicator. “Economies thrive when individuals
strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it
is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are
routes to personal well-being” (page 220). The cycle continues because
by believing wealth brings happiness, we engage in the very activity that perpetuates
the belief. Work more; earn more; spend more; smile more; repeat. He makes
the same sobering case for our belief that having children brings us happiness.
Want to know why people value things more after they own them than before? Why pain is often greater from small losses than large? Why predictions of the future that seemed so awesome in the past look ridiculous in the present? Why so many ideas that soared with the focus groups, bombed in the market? The message from Gilbert is not likely to make you happy. But it might give you some insight into the way consumers think. At the very least, it will make you question the questions that you expect focus groups to answer with any degree of certainty.
BARQ
For those whose hectic schedules don't allow for much time to read, visit www.audible.com to download an unabridged audio version.
