HERE ARE FIVE widely held beliefs about marketing and decision making that we collected from recent publications. This book explains why these (and other) statements are becoming less true today, and why they are likely to be even less true in the future:
“A company’s brand is more important today than it has ever been.”
“Nurturing loyalty should be the marketer’s primary, day-to-day concern.”
“All customers are irrational.”
“An overload of options may actually paralyze people.”
“Positioning is the most important part of the marketing game.” 1
Why do we think that these mantras will become less relevant? Our answer is rooted in a fundamental shift in consumer decision making: Consumers used to make decisions relative to other things—a brand name, their previous experience with a company, an inflated list price, a brand’s advertising message compared to competing brands’ messages, or the other products a marketer chose to display on a catalog page or on the shelf. Conventional wisdom still holds that people’s choices can be greatly influenced by the context or the framing of an offer.
But for the first time this is starting to change and we’re moving toward an age of nearly perfect information. Review sites, shopping apps on smartphones, an extended network of acquaintances available through social media, and unprecedented access to experts and other sources, all mean that many consumers today operate in a radically different, socially intensive information environment. In a world where consumers enjoy complete access to informed experts and various information services, where they can instantly read the opinions of previous users, it’s much easier for consumers to predict their likely experience with a product or a service—it’s easier to know the absolute value of things.
When we talk about “absolute value” we refer to the experienced quality of a product. For example, the experience at a restaurant, the pleasure (or boredom) one might experience reading a book, the closeness of the shave, the actual comfort of headphones, or the usage value you get from using your camera. So “absolute value” doesn’t only refer to the technical specifications and reliability of a camera, but to what it is like to own and actually use it. In short: The new information environment around us allows consumers to predict much more accurately the experienced quality (or absolute value) of products and services they consider getting.
The implications for consumers and businesses are enormous. First, reliance on absolute values means that, on average, consumers tend to make better decisions and become less susceptible to context or framing manipulations. For businesses it means that marketing is changing forever. When consumers can more easily assess absolute values, this means that the influence of “relative forces” (such as branding, loyalty, and positioning) that used to drive predictions of the experienced quality of things is, for numerous products and services, rapidly declining.
The fundamental shift from relative to absolute requires managers, marketers, and business strategists to reexamine everything, and it gives rise to the need for a new way of thinking about marketing (and for a new language to talk about it). This is why we offer an entirely new framework (which we call the Influence Mix) for making more effective marketing decisions based on the mix of influence sources that your customers rely on. The reality is that the shift from relative to absolute is taking place in some product categories and for some consumers much faster than for others. This framework will let marketers better understand where things are changing and where they are not, and apply the marketing strategies and programs that are appropriate in each case.
Our agent, Jim Levine, always likes to say that a good business book should address three questions: 1) What? 2) So what? and 3) Now what? We can summarize everything we said so far by answering these questions: What? There’s a fundamental shift in consumer decision making. Instead of relying on relative evaluations, for the first time in history consumers have the tools to assess the absolute value of things. So what? This means that consumers are likely to make better decisions (on average) and that marketing is changing forever because people will rely less on proxies for quality such as brand names, loyalty, or positioning. Now what? All this gives rise to the need for a new framework and approach to marketing, which we call the Influence Mix.
To help you navigate through our book, we divided it into three sections which (more or less) correspond to the three questions above. In Part I—A Shift from Relative to Absolute—we establish the foundation. In Chapter 1 we show how a company can benefit from the shift: Since brand names play a reduced role as proxies for quality, ASUS was able to reach the fifth place in worldwide PC shipments without heavily investing in building its brand. Of course, we’ll go deeper into the theory (and will present some experimental evidence) regarding the shift away from relative evaluations in today’s shopping environment. In Chapter 2, we explain why some of the key demonstrations of “irrational” consumer decisions are becoming less relevant. We all have been flooded with books and articles about how “irrational” we are, but the new information environment actually allows us to make better choices overall that are based on absolute values—the building blocks of effective decisions. We’ve also heard a lot in recent years about choice overload—the notion that we are overwhelmed by too many choices—but in Chapter 3 we question the robustness of this notion. Using a variety of information search aides, most consumers can handle the available information selectively and efficiently; we also describe some new patterns in decision making that emerge in the age of abundant, low-cost information. In Chapter 4 we address a question that some readers may have on their minds: With the constant trickle of stories in the media about fake reviews and other attempts to game the system, why are we still bullish about absolute values?
In Part II—How Marketing Changes Forever—we describe previously unrecognized implications of the current environment for business, marketing practice, and consumer decision making. In Chapter 5 we explain why brands are losing their role as proxies for quality. We explore, for example, how Yelp affected the revenues of big chain restaurants, and the opportunities it opens to other businesses. In Chapter 6 we explore the topic of loyalty and satisfaction. When consumers rely on absolute values and less on their past experience, loyalty declines. What are the implications to business? You can never rest on your laurels (think Nokia or BlackBerry), but it also opens some opportunities. In Chapter 7 we discuss how some theories of diffusion are changing when uncertainty about innovations is resolved much faster than in the past. We’ll discuss, for example, how Pinterest defied the traditional thinking about technology adoption in Silicon Valley. Then, in Chapter 8 we argue that when it’s easier to assess absolute values, positioning and persuasion techniques are likely to become less effective. (In the old days, Volvo could position itself as the safest car. It’s much harder to do when customers use different information sources.)
In Part III—A New Framework—we introduce the Influence Mix, which should help managers determine where their products fall with respect to the evolving customer decision making. As we explain in Chapter 9, there are categories, segments, and situations where consumers still heavily depend on relative evaluations (while absolute values drive the choice of a new camera, brand names and habits continue to be key drivers in choices of beer). Once a company determines the mix of sources that influence its customers, that mix should drive their strategy. This applies to its communication strategy (which we discuss in Chapter 10) and its market research program (the subject of Chapter 11), and it can also differ by segment (which we cover in Chapter 12). Throughout this section we emphasize that the Influence Mix is dynamic. A segment that is currently influenced by traditional information sources can move to new sources rather quickly. This is particularly true as new sorting and search tools (which are even easier to use than existing ones) will keep emerging, which is the topic of Chapter 13. Then, in Chapter 14 we make some final comments about the shape of things to come and illustrate how particular managerial practices such as pricing or organizational structure might be revised to fit the new reality.
When we introduce the idea of absolute value to people, we get all kinds of questions, so let us briefly address the two most frequent ones (and we’ll expand on these and other questions later on). The first question that often comes up: Is there even such a thing as absolute value? Our answer is that when we talk about absolute value, we don’t necessarily mean to say that people will find the absolute best option (assuming that an absolute best option exists), and some ambiguity about the absolute best is likely to remain, in part because our own preferences are often vague and unstable. We’re talking about a “good enough” answer or about getting closer to (but usually not reaching) the absolute value of things. The second question we often hear: Doesn’t value depend on the individual? Isn’t it subjective? Our answer: Yes, an absolute value may very well differ from one person to another (though it may be similar for consumers who have similar tastes). Our point is that today you can more easily determine the absolute value of something to you, because you can get information from so many experts and users, some of whom may share your tastes. And even when an absolute factual answer cannot be determined, consumers usually prefer it over the answer they’ll get from a marketer.
Perhaps the simplest way to understand what we mean by “absolute” is to think about it as the opposite of “relative.” In the old days, consumers were much more susceptible to being influenced by relative things. When considering what laptop to get, Jeff made his decision relative to things like the brand name or his past experience with that brand, whereas today, with not much effort, Jeff can obtain good diagnostic information regarding his likely experience with that laptop, and thus get closer to the absolute value of that product.
We both used to believe in the currently accepted mantras regarding branding, positioning, loyalty, information overload, and consumers’ “irrationality.” Relative thinking is deeply embedded in the business world and, like everyone else, we’ve heard for decades that it’s all (or mostly) about how companies frame or position things. For each of us, this book represents a major journey away from our original beliefs.
As a researcher, Itamar started with a deep conviction that consumers typically do not have real preferences, are easily malleable, tend to act irrationally, and can’t really evaluate real quality. He, in fact, made his own contributions to reinforcing these beliefs, for example by discovering the compromise effect (consumers’ tendency to select the middle option from any option set placed in front of them). The rise of the Internet didn’t change these core beliefs. If anything, it seemed that the Internet added to the information overload and made consumers even more irrational and confused than in the old days. Yet a few years ago, Itamar started having second thoughts. He published some papers that raised questions about the effect of the current information environment on the validity of his own (and others’) prior research about consumer irrationality and inability to determine product quality.
Emanuel’s journey was different. Coming from the world of advertising, he was initially an avid believer in the power of promotion, branding, and positioning. In his mind, marketing started with brand awareness so you needed to hammer the brand name into people’s minds. As he made the shift to technology marketing, he started to appreciate the power of word of mouth and interpersonal influence and he wrote extensively about the topic. Although he was one of the first authors to write about the expected rise of interpersonal influence in marketing, his discussion was still within the framework of established marketing concepts and diffusion of innovation theory (which was rooted in a world of much greater uncertainty).
In 2008 we got together to write a book about the future of marketing. It didn’t take us long to agree that as humans we’re not well equipped to predict the future. But we also recognized that even though we can’t really tell what will happen, we see enough evidence in the present to discuss some possible directions. Itamar brought insights from decision making theory and consumer psychology. Emanuel brought his practical experience and his knowledge on interpersonal influence. We felt that together, perhaps we can truly understand what is really changing in the new environment and go beyond the rhetoric of recent buzzwords such as “the newly empowered consumer.” Over the past five years we’ve witnessed tools and platforms evolving to further enable access to absolute values: Review sites got better at sorting and summarizing information. Shopping apps on smartphones brought the trends we discuss to brick-and-mortar stores. New tools, apps, and websites kept coming and helped us realize the extent to which things are changing. That when consumers can get closer to absolute values, everything needs to be reevaluated.
We’re sure we’ll get some things wrong, and hopefully some things right. Our objective is not to pinpoint what will happen, but to think—and provoke thinking—about the future of marketing and consumer decision making.
Stanford/Menlo Park
May 2013