Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

SUMMARY: Beware of software tools promising quick answers.

There are lots of companies popping up, claiming that their tool is be able to sift through the sea of internet chatter and bring marketing insights front and center in a beautiful chart or dashboard.

The only trouble is, they’re mostly full of it.

Analysis of online conversations is a complex business, not only because of the sheer volume of posts to analyze, but also because of the over-simplified way that some of the most popular tools present the data returned.  And both these issues make people to want to accept the ‘figures’ provided them - after all, the data _looks_ authoritative, right?

Over on Bloomberg Business Week, there is an article about a social media analytics company that mines millions of postings on social media sites to provide ‘insights’ back to advertisers.  But they tellingly tout their speed - software that reads and analyzes thousands of sentences per minute - finding “77,000 mentions of stubble online in less than six seconds.”  This is tech window dressing - Google is faster.  So what is being returned that is so smart?  The article goes on to mention that the company’s researchers isolated all the positive comments, categorized them into themes, and built a chart for the client ‘in less than an hour’ ranking the topics of conversation and motivation for the posters.

There are a few key things to watch out for in this story:

1.  You’re never going to be able to isolate _all_ the comments on any tool.  Not all conversations are public, and not all conversations are online.  Period.  Remember that you are only going to be able to analyze what someone decided to put online.

2. The people who buy your products are not necessarily the same people as those who tend to post a lot.  People who post a lot tend to want to talk (surprise), not necessarily listen or engage.  Always pay attention if a company says that they can being you the voice of your user - more likely than not they want to bring you the voice of a user, but not necessarily your user.

3. If the researchers took the time to go through any of the 77,000 mentions, they would probably find that well over half the returned posts are spam, and half of those remaining are not relevant.  Even with spam filters in place, it is amazing how few posts returned by the major tools are on-topic and usable.

4. Automated sentiment is notoriously inaccurate - with the vast majority of tools returning 80% of posts with no sentiment applied whatsoever, and often incorrect flagging of the balance.

5. They try to talk about the tool doing the heavy-lifting, but if you read carefully it’s clear that the research team had to synthesize the actual results.  Software stinks at thinking like a human, and so it was really the research team that pulled the insight together.  And pulling an insight together in an hour is not my idea of a powerful selling point.  I’d rather the team spend the time to come up with an answer that changes my thinking, or changes behavior, or changes the world.

Simply put - tools and companies that tout both speed and correct answers are pulling your leg.  There is no Google for insights where you just plug your question in and get a smart answer popped back to you.  It takes hard work, manual review and critical thinking.  Add smart tools to this kind of a mix, and you start really being able to change the world and turn the industry on its head.

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Within the pursuit of being students of human behavior, Leo Burnett researcher Carol Foley is developing a typology of human behavior, called Behavioral Archetypes (SM).

The Tool allows the classification of human behavior and the brands response behavior.
Our starting point for all explorations of behavior must be to identify and understand what people are doing right now with regard to our brand or product.

The psychological literature is full of references to specific types of behavior.

• Risk-taking
• Habit
• Altruism
• Status seeking.

Yet no one has sorted out all of these various types of behavior, nor created a schema of their relationships to one another.

Were we to be able to do this, we could begin with the behavior itself, rather than with a psychological perspective, and then allow the relevant perspectives to inform that behavior further.

Through over 10,000 interviews in multiple studies, we’ve been able to quantitatively map all of the major types of behavior into a paradigm.

• We gave people life situations as stimuli
• Asked them to rate how likely they would be to engage in a list of behaviors
• Factor analyzed the behaviors to establish archetypes
• Used correspondence analysis to map them, so as to understand dimensionality
• There are over 100 archetypes in the paradigm which collapse into 8 major groupings.

What is important about Behavioral Archetypes(SM), and what substantially validates it, is the degree to which it mirrors models of human motives and values. The model allows for spotting adjacent behaviors (e.g. the freedom behavior’s neighbours are self-interest and change) as well as opposite behaviors (e.g. the the change behavior’s opposite is preservation) as well as 40-50 sub-behaviors per behavior category. See below.

Further investigation into human behavior with this model also leads to insights (behavior tensions) regarding

1. the effects of exaggerating a behavior (e.g. an exaggerated behavior of self-interest leads to narcissism)
2. Resolving behaviors, i.e. which behaviors pop-up in situations where things don’t go as people had planned. E.g. (when exhibiting a Preservation behavior and things do not go as planned, preservation behaviors such as “Security Seeking” are replaced by opposite preservation behaviors, such as “Minimizing Impact”.
3. Defining Themes. i.e. we believe between in the tension within 2 behaviors often lie defining themes in peoples lives, i.e. the personal decision and influence over our own competing behaviors lead to defining themes, such as between Freedom and Conformity behaviors, we always seem to get the question “Who decides?”. When I am exhibiting Freedom behavior it is my will to decide by myself and reject all heteronymy. Therefore, I always battle external forces making the decisions for me.

The tool lends itself to a more structured approach to behavior investigation, spotting behavioral tensions within the people that are most important to a brand and to formulate a brand behavior response.

If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us.

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