Attention, Attention Please!!

What is the attention?

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In order to make it easier to read and actually don’t lose your attention we are going to focus directly in the first and the second aspects of attention.

1 - Bottom-up

This type of attention is a rapid, automatic form of selective attention that depends on the intrinsic properties of the input, such as its color or intensity (Koch 2004). Also it works with brightness and movement. It is also known as saliency-based attention, indicating that the more salient an object, the higher the probability of it being noticed.

The main idea is automation, it means that most of the times you can’t control it. And in case you want not to pay attention you even have to focus on it.

It can be seen as a pre-attention

2 - Top-Down Control

Top-down control depends on internal and external states, goals, and expectations. Hence, looking  for a can of Coke will enhance processing of red areas in visual input by increasing the neuronal sensitivity for that particular color (Theeuwes, 2010; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Van der Lans, Pieters, & Wedel, 2008)

The main idea is that the information that is relevant for goal attainment will be attended to more than irrelevant  information. For example, when we are thirsty, we pay more attention to drinks than to other ítems.

It can be seen as focal-attention.

Just to finish, here we have a funny example of focal-attention. 

What about attention on Marketing?

It is especially important to drag the attention (because it is highly correlated with 'buy intention') of customer in Retail. We can take advantages of the attention tips in order to organize the shelfs and as well the 'shopping trip'. 

For example, we can say that product which drag top-down control attention should be at the back of the store so you force the your potencial customer to go through all the supermarket and visualize other product via bottom-up attention. 

Thanks for your time!

Hope you can enjoy!

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Changes on purpose

Changes are common in this “modern time”. From X-gen to Y-Gen, Millennials to Generation Z, isolated business to big economics blocks, changes are everywhere and in every magnitude. Time changes everything and “Purpose of the business” is not foreign to this trend.

My personal view of Purpose is that it has change during last decades, and even today is continuously evolving. I find two distinctive moments, first one when the purpose was personal benefit and the benefit for the society was pursuit if possible, and second one, the modern view of purpose, which goes after the benefit of the whole society, the need to make this world a better place and as consequence achieve the personal benefit.

After thinking on this topic I came to the conclusion that these changes are generated due to changes in the society. As society is the only cluster that aggregates all the consumer and prospects of all the companies of the world, changes in this group will impact in all of them. The change we can appreciate is that people has been becoming more concern on well-being, on greater benefits and on trying to make a better world for everyone. We can prove it from different point of view depending on the group of interest; as an example we can say that taking care of environment is making a better place, or also the inclusion of minorities could impact on major benefit for those societies. But as we see they are all ways of making greater good for all of us.

As an example I would like to quote P&G Purpose: 

“We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.”

Where we can see exposed the benefit for the today’s and next generations’ consumers (what we can call “society benefit”) and also the benefit of the shareholders (what we can call “personal benefit”) that comes as results of the previous one.

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Experiencing Self vs Remembering Self Daniel Kahneman point of view

Why is different the feeling of the experience vs the memory of the feeling? Which one is more important for our choice decision path?

According to Daniel Kahneman we have two selves. One of them is the experiencing self that is the one that lives in the present, the one that feels. On the other hand, we have the remembering self, which is the one that store the story of your life. Let’s give an easy example to understand how this works (Example provide by D.Kahneman).

Colonoscopy test among the 2 systems.

The example provided is from the time when it was painfully to have a colonoscopy. On the next graph you can see two different colonoscopies.

The first doctor performed a shorter colonoscopy (9 minutes) but it stop in the most painful part. The second continue with the colonoscopy so it is longer but it finishes in a lower level of pain.

So here are some interesting questions to think:

Who is the patient that suffers the most? Which surgeon would you choose in your next colonoscopy?

Here we have to differentiate the two systems, the system 1 (Experiencing self) would say that the Patient B felt more aggregated pain (it was a longer operation with the same peaks of pain).

The interesting thing to understand is that for the system 2 (Remembering self) the story is a little bit different. For system 2, time is not very important, so the extra-time would not affect the measure of the pain in this systems. But the fact that the last moment of the surgery on Patient A is on the highest level of pain will store the event as a worse memory than the surgery perform to Patient B. This is very important to answer the second question, because in order to make new decisions we reach our past experience to decide, so its probably that although Patient B suffers more he had a better remembering of the experience and he is going to choose surgeon 2 in case of a new colonoscopy.

So what do you think is more important in a brand/product experience, the experience itself or the remembering of the experience? 

Since I heard Daniel Kahneman I start to analyze regular daily situations and how we remember them. For example when you go to a restaurant, what would happened if they charge you before you eat. Probably your memories wouldn't be about paying but about having the great dinner. Or maybe if after you pay the restaurant give you candy on your way out? Will these enhance the experience and make your "remembering self" to choose you again? There are a lot of factors among the decision making process but these are strategies that I probably would use to increase my results in any business.


Here is the complete lecture of D.Kahneman

As always, thanks for taking the time for reading.

Any comment will be well received.

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Mirror Neurons. Understanding other’s emotions via internal simulation.

What are the Mirror Neurons?

Mirror neurons (Rizzolatti, G.) Hypothesis: “Mirror neurons” transforms sensory information describing actions of others into a motor format similar to that the observers internally generate when they imagine themselves doing that action or when they actually perform it. That is the book definition, but to make it easy, we can say that mirror neurons activate our brain in a similar way that the brain activation that have had the others that actually is feeling the emotion. In some way, it could be related to empathy. This process is done as an internal simulation of the looked emotion. But it comes up the question if we able to recognize the feelings of other due to their facial expressions.

Do we recognize expressions? Is this a learned or an innate competence?

It is pretty normal to recognize the fundamental expression such us happiness, sadness, anger, boredom. But how do we understand them? First let’s see some funny fact about a learnt behavior of our brain that tends to feel comfortable with the objects they see all the time. Specially our faces since this is one of the things in which we spent most of our time seeing (remember we are social animal and we live in community).


Let's try to understand some brain behavior using an interesting example: please check the two photos. Then click on the second (the rotated one).

Now we can see how confortable we feel with the mouth and the eyes not being rotated, and that is because our brain realize they are in the way they should be, even though most of us do not have a clue.

Here is another example.

Question: which one is the depression of the surface and which one is the elevation of the surface?

The answer is that they are the same picture but rotated, but why we perceive the first as the hole and the second as a hill? That is because to adaptation and learning that the light comes from above of us we tend to make that guess. But image if the light comes from the inside? Probably we would in reverse. So these examples could say that we learn from our experience and for example when we see “happy” people we can learn from the facial expressions and then understand them in other situations. As a matter of fact, this is NOT TRUE. There is a great study done on blind people where they compare facial expressions on athletes that have been blind since they were born so it was impossible for them to learn the facial expressions, and in fact the expressions correlates almost perfectly between them showing that fundamental emotions are INNATE.

Marketing applications

This is very important to communication, for example in print media. Because maybe you can use mirror neurons to induce behavior in your consumers. Just as an example we can see: STRENGTH? EMPOWERMENT? Try it yourself with different campaigns an try to figure it out what emotions is trying to emphasize with.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read. Any comment will be well received.

Bibliography

1. psychcentral.com/news/2008/12/30/facial-expressions-are-innate-not-learned/3570.html 
2. http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/english/staff/rizzolat.htm

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Pavlovian Conditioning can help us to educate our consumers?

In this article I would like to talk a little bit about some learnings I got from my Neuroscience courses. I find this topic really interesting due to the applications in marketing. 

In this case we are going to see how Sheldon uses it to educate Penny in order to avoid her bad behavior (from Sheldon’s point of view)

First we are going to define two situations in order to make the explanation easier: 

Neutral situation:

• Unconditional Stimulus: Eating chocolate
• Unconditional Response: Feeling good/ Having some pleasure (in this case provide by chocolate)

Conditioning situation:

• Conditional Stimulus: If she behave she get some chocolate
• Conditional Response: She just behaves and feels good about it without needing the positive reinforcement of the chocolate (that’s when Penny gets fully trained.)

The idea is to associate the response of the neutral situation with the conditioning one by repeating the conditioning stimulus very times till the brain adapts to having the good sensation after behaving well (despite the satisfaction is provide by the chocolate, we educate the brain to think that is provide by the action of well behavior). So then a good behavior provides a good feeling.

Neuroscience point of view

Let's take this to the next level.

There is a part of our brain that reacts to rewards (actually expected rewards as you will see). If we measure this single-cell activity we can know when this part activate and relate it with the different moments of the exercise.

Now we can see that the two moments and the brain activation. The first moment is the sound stimulus and the second is the reward. We can see the chronology as long as the experiment gets repeated. And we can see how the brain activation (that is when most of the points get closer horizontally) changes from the reward moment to the conditioned stimulus sound as the experiment goes on proving that the dog actually get excited by the expected reward.

This became amazing when you think about your consumers, because it happens the exact same. Let’s talk about some examples from Coca-Cola. It has been proven that the best moment, I mean the peak of pleasure about drinking a Coke is the exact previous millisecond of drinking, because all your brain is fully expecting the moment and imagine the best Coke ever. And that’s not a coincidence. You have been taught by Coca-Cola (and many other big brands) to have a responsive behavior to their products. 

So you have to be very careful when you execute your brand campaigns because every time you talk to your consumers you are telling them how to feel about your products. And that will take part on the decision process and could make the difference in the consumers’ choice.

Thanks for your time!

Any comment will be well received.

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Consumers “Deep Insights”, do they change over time?

When we analyze our consumers, every Researcher or Marketer dreams about finding the Insight that will allow their Brand to differentiate and if it is well executed would increase exponentially their sales. But are our key findings perdurable in time?

As kick off I would like you to see Chandlers Bing New Computer Video:

His brand new computer has 12 MB of RAM and 500MB of Hard Disk, and he use it for games and stuff. And we start thinking, what would we say today with computers of more 32 GB ( 32000 MB; It is 2666X times Chandler’s Computer) and hard drives in around Terabytes, but we keep on using it for having fun. So what I want to reach the conclusion that the true insight has no change and it is: PEOPLE LIKE TO HAVE FUN. 

Yes we know that we did not discorver dynamite but it is important to recall it, because even time passes and people change, true deep insights will remain.

I always remember a quote from a very important member from my job in P&G: "The deeper the Insights is, the more universal it becames. People is like an onion and our true insights are in the inner layers". That's why we can apply them for a wider target or segment. But despite the good it looks like, those insights are the most difficult to discover. Thats the main reason of why better insights are (some times) discovered when you look in consumer that is not your average. Because all the uncertainity allows us an easier way to reach their inner thoughts and from the understanding of their behaviour we can develop very valuable insights.

Thank you very much for your time! I hope you enjoy.

Any comment will be well receive. 

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What is Dan Ariely’s Self-Herding and Long Terms effects of initial decisions?

What is Self-Herding?

Self-Herding is “our tendency to follow the same decisions we have made in the past (future decision are influenced by previous decisions).”

What about following the herd?

As an example to picture the idea we can imagine two exact restaurants. Restaurant A and Restaurant B, both have the same menu, same prices, etc. So imagine one person came, and chose one of them. He has not any previous information about them, so he chooses Restaurant B. Then other person arrives, and sees Restaurant A with zero people and Restaurant B with one person. Which would you think he would choose? He would choose Restaurant B, because he may think it is better because the first person is there. And so on people will continue arriving and Restaurant B is a hit and Restaurant A is a failure, where everything was a consequence of the initial decision.

But this is not a rational decision, it comes from our instincts. For a better understanding, there is another example about Exit doors. What would make you choose an Exit door? Imagine you are in a mall and there is a fire. You see all people running in one direction. Are you going to say, “Ok, maybe there is another way out, I should run the exact other way..?” NOO! People always follow the herd. We don't like to make decisions. As easiest as possible is the way, we are going to take it. 

“We remember our actions but we don’t remember why.”

There is another beautiful example provided by Dan and also my favorite one. And please remember this first sentence.

Starbucks Coffee or Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee?

As a kick-off question, please take some seconds to try this: How much would you pay for a coffee? How do you get to that conclusion?

Rational Theory explains that we internally make a trade-off between the value that coffee adds to ourselves vs its cost. If its value is more that its cost, we buy. Otherwise, we don’t.

It looks really coherent, but here we are going to try a different approach. Let´s say we always get a coffee before going to work in Dunkin’ Donuts for $0.40. Same routine every day. But one day we go out early from work, and we are thirsty, so thirsty and tired that we need a coffee imperatively. We run into a Starbucks (with no previous information about it) and we decide to buy. But when we look at the prices, the coffee costs $2.40. The Dunkin Donuts was far, so the cost was higher also, and we really need that coffee. So we buy. What happened next? Next time we run into Starbucks to buy a coffee our mind does not remember the emotional transient from the other time, it doesn’t remember how thirsty we were or how tired or wherever. It just reminds that we bought. So necessarily it should have been a good deal. And then, we repurchased coffee in Starbucks. This mind process keeps on and on defining what Dan calls Self-Herding Path. And when time goes on, we remember less our first emotional state and our bought become less judgmental.

But then, why Dunkin Donuts first decision does not impact on Starbucks? The main reason is the effort that Starbucks have been doing to appear as a different category. People’s mind tends to compare within category. For example when you go to a restaurant and you look at wine’s prices, do you compare with how much milk could you buy with that money? NO! You just check the prices between the wines. This is the same. Starbucks do not have donuts,  it have croissants. It do not have simple coffee, it have macchiato, cappuccino, etc... So people’s mind does not tend to compare.

Those are some examples the long lasting effects of initial decisions, and we can see how irrationality behaviors impact ourselves in daily basis.

Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely (born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli American professor of psychology and behavioral economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and also the co-founder of BEworks. Ariely's talks on TED have been watched over 4.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers, as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty

Thanks for taking the time to read! Hope you have enjoy!

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