I have a big last name.  “Booth-Butterfield.”  And that hyphen.  Okay, mock me.  I deserve it.  The hyphen, however, does have persuasion advantages.

Today, my sweet wife, Melanie Booth-Butterfield, received a personalized gift and fund raising appeal from her beloved Arbor Day Foundation.  It gave her free trees, a free book called the Free Tree Book, a free fragrant purple lilac, and a free year of coffee, PLUS an embossed sheet of adhesive mailing labels AND an attractive, personalized Certificate of Appreciation.  All presented proudly to:

Melanie B. Butter

What a hoot!  I cannot tell you how many times we’ve spotted persuasion plays from various charitable and not so charitable organizations over the years simply because no one gets our names straight.  Here are the most common attempts.

Steven B. Butterfield
Booth Butterfield
Steven Boothbutterfie
Stephen Butterworth
Steve Boothbut

Marketers out there harvesting personal contact information obviously have trouble with both the hyphen and the length of the last name.  It appears that most simply drop the hyphen then compress the two names into one word, but then the one word contains too many letters for the field width in their database, so we get these weird truncations, mashups, and mistakes.

But, the good news is that we can spot the faux friends immediately.  Even with ones as persuasion skilled as this Arbor Day Foundation ambush. All those warm, emotional folks making the world a better place, send us such tender, sweet, and generous notes, letters, and packages and, gee, they even let us,  if we’d like, write a check.  How about it,

D.R. Boothbutt

What’s most interesting to me is that for-profit companies almost never make this error.  They almost always get it right and never let the mistake stand.  Our good close personal friends who are saving the world somehow don’t see my name and its correct spelling as that important, I guess.  And really, what’s in a name?

As long as the check clears.

Shocking news!

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released a study of vehicle crashes that compared states with laws banning cell phone usage while driving to states without such laws.  Even if you don’t know much about history or time series statistics, if you just look at the figures in the report, you can see the Headline:  the Laws Have NO Effect.

Everyone is baffled.

“Absolutely, we were surprised by these results,” says Adrian Lund, president of IIHS and HLDI.

“The study raises as many questions as it answers,” says GHSA executive director Barbara Harsha.

Before we get into the merits of the case, just think about the science and the persuasion behind all of this.  We cannot randomly assign drivers to different conditions, most importantly here, cell phone usage, then observe what happens.  The absence of control is fatal to the quality of the science and the inferences we can confidently draw.  Yet, smart people persistently believe in the Observational Research Tooth Fairy and so we get Laws and Regulations, Nudges and Nags from well intentioned folks who say more than they really know; the sign of FauxItAll.

Worse still is the unscientific orientation of many researchers in Observational Research.  Most strain to confirm a hypothesis and design data collection and analysis to find anything that supports the hypothesis and almost never actively pursue disconfirming evidence.  There’s nothing wrong with entertaining alternative explanations, unless, of course, you already know the true answer and you’re just trying to convince the yokels.

Now, take uncontrolled Observational Research, a confirmation bias, and then add Small Effects and you’re ready for disappointment.  You don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to tell you that traffic accidents are extremely rare events compared to the amount of total driving and further that people drive and talk A LOT and that accidents while driving and talking are also extremely rare events compared again to the total.  Thus, people drive A LOT, but rarely have accidents; people drive and talk A LOT, but rarely have accidents.  The difference between Driving+Phones versus just Driving is a Small Effect.

Thus, we have the commonplace Perfect Storm for failure.  People using science as persuasion in their use of Observation, avoidance of contrary evidence and explanations, and those small effects.   Now, put that persuasion to work in State legislatures and you’ve got Laws and Regulations that produce no effect.

There is no doubt that conversation produces cognitive load and hence distraction for drivers.  Whether on a cell phone or just yackety-yak with a passenger, mere talk requires mental effort and capacity.  It’s just not that important for vehicle crashes.  There is a clear break in the scientific chain of effect between the obvious distraction and the actual wreck.  People tried to draw a straight line from distraction to crashing when it is clear from these data that there are intervening steps and processes that mitigate the distraction.  Nobody looked for those intervening steps.

It’s rather like the silly FDA and Food Police efforts with various kinds of warning labels – whether portion size, calorie count, any other information.  They expect that Warning Labels like this will cause people to eat less and lose weight as if a Warning Label functions like a double-wrapped strip of duck tape over a hungry mouth.  It doesn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

But, if you’re doing FauxItAll science, nothing else matters.

So, you’re walking along your favorite city street today when your cell phone beeps a text notification, so you look at the screen and Wow! there’s a coupon offer for 15% off any purchase in the next hour at North Face and Wow! you realize that North Face has a shop just a block up and a block over from you and Wow! you’ve been thinking about that new sweater and Wow! before you know it you’re already walking that block up and over and Wow! there you are at the checkout with that sweater and Wow! that 15% discount.  Is North Face cool or what?

Maybe.  Just maybe.  Or maybe not.  It’s complicated.  And it starts with location.

See, marketers are creating what they call geo-fences, electronic rings around businesses that sense GPS signals from opt-in cell phones.  When you cross the fence with your opt-in cell phone, the marketers pick up your signal, then match it to opt-in businesses within the fence that have offers.  The marketers then match your cell phone with your businesses and their offers, then shoot you opt-in text messages.  Think of it as a marketing dog collar and shock fence, but not for dogs; it’s for you.  And, at present there are no shocks.

From the Cascade perspective this is a rapid communication play wherein the fence triggers immediate Reception which torrents through prior Processing and Response to elicit almost instant behavior – Go or Not – as you amble along the road.  It’s a whistle and a shout, “Here, boy!  Come ‘ere, girl!” to a happy dog on a summer day lolling on the lawn now joyously interrupted with an exciting offer of a new play.

You’ll experience precious little High WATT Central Route processing of strong Arguments with this persuasion play.  This will be the hot Low WATT Cue on that text message:

Hey, look at all the North Face logos walking around me, everybody’s doing it, let’s join in!

Hey, North Face is the face of cool, what’s not to like with North Face?

Hey, North Face would protect me from the elements on Mount Everest, so they’ll keep me warm on this cold city day!

Hey, North Face is giving me this 15% discount, I need to give them something in return!

Hey, North Face is my brand and here’s my chance to prove my loyalty; onward a block up and over!

Hey, I’m the only guy on this busy street getting this rare offer of a discount from North Face that is only good for the next hour!

At least this is the theory and the dream behind the persuasion play.  Man, to quote the immortal Young Frankenstein, “It . . . Could . . . Work!”

But there are problems, problems, problems.

Initially, realize: It is a dog collar for people.  You don’t see it right now, but you will.  One day you’ll be waiting for an important message through your cell phone and your heart will jump when it buzzes with word of life, death, love, loss, victory, or defeat, except, it’s that damn North Face with a damn coupon dammit, leave me alone.  Then you’ll see the invisible dog fence you just crossed and you’ll realize every time you hit North Michigan and Ontario, your cell phone starts chirping.  And, you’ll go Commando, circling your favorite business areas trying to find the perimeter.

Now, consider:  How will marketers restrain themselves?  Sure, this whole play can be just fun like a dog playing fetch with the kids and sometimes we won’t mind being the dog as long as we’re having fun on a spring day with that blue sky and those puffy Simpson clouds.  But, what happens when greed and competition break all the shackles on business prudence and your cell phone is a constant shock box of offers, discounts, Get It Now! text messages?

Finally, ask:  How you gonna like it when the Queen of Tomorrow finally invents that iEye visor and you get subliminal messages when you cross her lines?  There’s an interesting future ahead of us, ladies and gents.  1984 and Brave New World are so quaint aren’t they?  Those high school chestnuts, remnants of the old modern neuroses clinging like cobwebs to our PostModern snark.  Except maybe Orwell and Huxley weren’t Moderns, but Prophets for All the Ages.

Consider, Mr. Orwell . . .

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.  A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself –anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.  In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face . . . was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…”

Now, Brave New World . . .

“I only said it was lovely here because . . . well, because progress is lovely, isn’t it?”

Persuasion, persuasion, persuasion.

Feedback, information on the difference between your current situation and a desired outcome, is a powerful tool for change.  People are naturally equipped with the ability to make these comparisons and then make adjustments to thinking, feeling, or acting to move the current state toward the goal.  Here’s a great story in the Wall Street Journal that describes how power companies are using feedback through usage meters and pricing strategies to alter consumer efficiency.

Usage meters are more sophisticated meters that not only measure energy use, but also provide easy to access, real time, and understandable feedback to the consumer.  Smarter meters are also hooked into a control system where consumers can program energy devices in ways that make them more efficient RIGHT NOW.

Now, none of this is rocket science either to consumers or power companies.  The interesting wrinkle, however, is how much more complicated the system has become with the addition of feedback.  In persuasion terms, the TACT has gone from a fairly generic definition of the Who (any customer) to a much more segmented definition (customers who have health problems that require a constant energy usage; customers who have people at home all the time versus customers who don’t; and on and on).  With feedback meters, the great variety of individual difference comes into play.

In essence, the meters have created a massive persuasion system of interacting people all with individual needs and desires, responding on the basis of not only the meter usage (and price implications) but also thoughts and feelings about control, justice, the Good Life, community demands, and on and on.  We have a complex social system of interacting people with diverse needs and desires.  We’ve got Persuasion, baby!

Now, you need to keep your head on straight and all the concepts orderly.  Feedback is not a form of Reinforcement Theory.  Feedback does not provide Consequences, only Information that compares two States.  The Consequences come from the power company in the form of Price.  The power folks are testing combinations of Carrots (rebates) and Sticks (higher prices at peak times) to see what works because no simple Consequence pattern works with all these diverse TACTs.  So far, they appear to find that people are more sensitive to Loss (higher prices) than Gain (rebates) which is common, so expect pain from the power guys – it tends to work better.

Note, too, the Attribution plays in here.  Customers can only make internal attributions (I did it) for their energy consumption (assuming fair meters).  Thus, the feedback tends to keep people on an internal motivation track rather than an external motivation track.  This difference is important.  Internal motivated people will control themselves and find methods that they like while externally motivated people wait around for The Man to push the buttons and complain all the while about it.

Additionally, all this action will probably generate High WATT, Central Route processors who look for the Arguments (like Price, Convenience, and Comfort).  People really think about this so you’ll get all the positive outcomes of Central Route activity:  More persistence, resistance to counter arguments, and prediction of future behavior.

The really Good News here is that the average effect of meters across all TACTs is positive and appears to produce a small Windowpane effect size (about a 10% reduction in usage).  Larger effects in usage arise with combinations of TACTs and price (people who turned on everything all the time and left them running react quickly to use and price).  Furthermore, this effect occurs immediately, typically within the first billing cycle.  Thus, everyone starts recovering the investment cost of the meters almost from the starting gun as opposed to other Green tactics that can take years of use to break even (as in this foolish, but faddish application – scroll to near end of the post).

The most interesting news reported in the story is anecdotal evidence offered by the power companies:  They claim consumers have positive attitudes and affect toward the meters.  This positivity is not universal (why would you expect that?).  In one case, meters were installed in a large community just before an unusual heat wave hit.  When consumers got their bills which were unusually higher for the time of year because of that heat wave, they attributed the increase to the presence of the meters (”The damn things are miscalibrated to favor the power company!”).  Thus, barring unfortunate coincidences like this, people respond favorably to feedback.

To close the persuasion lesson here, please note that feedback is a special combination of information.  Everyone has to agree on the Goal State, what it means, what it looks like.  Everyone has to agree on the Current State.  When you provide fair information that accurately compares Where You Are to Where You Want To Be, you’ve got Feedback.  You could also add some fabulous persuasion plays to amplify effects, but that’s another post.  I also suspect that the Power boys and girls aren’t thinking Persuasion since they’ve got Price, but they could earn more Profit if they combined Persuasion with Price in this Feedback Play.

Many years ago I was a regular reader and subscriber to the premier science publication in the English language, the journal, Science.  Real scientists, like those the hit TV show Big Bang lovingly mocks, would give an arm and either or both legs for a vita hit in Science.  It’s huge.  I stopped my subscription because the then current editor, Donald Kennedy, had an Ahab complex aimed at harpooning his Great White Whale, the former President George W. Bush and used the journal as his personal platform in a merger of self concept, science, and political advocacy.  But, real scientists would still kill to get into it because it is the real source for real science.

Today I received a complementary copy of the newest issue of Science and an offer to resubscribe.  The offer is an interesting mix of applied persuasion and first class cluelessness.  The offer to resubscribe was one page called an Exclusive Benefits Voucher Form that looked like a combined come-on ad and payment form.  There was no personalized letter, no brochure, no free gift.  The Voucher Form also contained a persuasion classic, the  bullet list of benefits like:

You’ve seen this form a thousand times largely because persuasion researchers have experimentally tested it, then published their results in various peer review journals.  It works and we know why.  Basic science, you know.

Except you’ll rarely see persuasion science in Science.  Every now and then they publish economics research that is a drawn from prior social psychology work published twenty years ago.  Of course, this prior work is not cited because it didn’t use fake money as the dependent variable and instead actually used real money which makes it an applied study, you know.

So Science uses a science it won’t acknowledge as a science for publication in its page to guide its marketing efforts during the current hard times.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Consider my Rule:  If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It.

Please realize this Rule does not mean:  If You Can Count It, You Can Change It.

I can count the gray hairs in my beard, the wrinkles on my face, and the stretch of the skin over my elbow, and even if you color, nip, or tuck them, I’m still getting older.  You can count it, but you cannot change it.  Many smart people miss this distinction and believe that the power of counting provides the power of changing.

Consider various Credible Sources in the now running gag of calorie counts on menus as a way to change waistlines.  A common sense reading of the scientific literature indicates that you can do a lot of counting on this problem, but Calorie Counts won’t change hips, thighs, and bellies.  People do not change their diet enough from this intervention to create a practical, lasting change.  But Cool Credible Sources keep counting into the wind.

Consider this NYT unsigned editorial and the scientific study they cite in the editorial.  Both pieces argue that Calorie Counts are good, they work, and they should be expanded.  Please try and read the new scientific study the Times references, because that study is a great illustration of Counting Ain’t Changing.

First, realize that this scientific study is not quite scientific in the usual sense of the term.  It comes from guys who call themselves scientists (okay economists, but most of us here aren’t real scientists, meaning physicists, but we’ll ignore that distinction), working in a scientific program (a Graduate School of Business), at a university that does science (Stanford).  So, the paper is scientific in that sense.  But, the paper as cited by the Times is not scientific in the sense that it has been reviewed, accepted, and published in the scientific literature.  It’s been published by PR release, no peer review now.  Inspect it closely, but you’ll find no mark of consideration and acceptance from a larger field of experts.

Second, while these economists know how to count, they do not know how to change.  They find that when Starbucks restaurants started using calorie counts on their menus, the amount of ordered calories decreased 6%.  Working the way economists do with assumptions (assume this 6% always works with all menus and every restaurant uses them and Americans obtain about 25% of the calories from restaurants and on and on), the economists explain that 6% difference in the real world as:

If average daily intake is around 2,000 calories, the implied calorie reduction is 30 calories per day.

Thirty.  Trente.  Dreißig.  Treinta.  Si.  San Jyu.  A day.

Thirty calories is a real thing.  You can make 30 calories in a chemistry experiment or by slicing a slice of Wonder Bread in half.  Calories exist and you can count them.  But, if by some miracle you could create an intervention that caused everyone to eat 30 fewer calories a day, it would have no practical impact on their waistlines.  Their metabolism would adjust to this frip of a  decrease in a few days or weeks and maintain the old body weight.

Yet, the study authors and the unnamed Times editorialist think that their counts means your change.

Consider, finally and briefly, another Rule.

There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.

Persuasion makes a change.  The Cool Credible Counters at the Times and Stanford only imagine that they do.  The Times and Stanford offers the Image of Truth in their Mirrors, but not the Persuasion of Truth because their claims fail.  Cassandra cautions these writers:  Credibility for Attention is a Losing Trade.

USA Today has been hammering away on research that proves, Sitting Kills You!  I won’t bore you with the details that you can sort out to your heart’s content in much the way I sorted buttons in a button box for my GreatGrandMother Mattie when she needed to divert me on rainy days.  I’ll just note two big buttons:  Observational Method and Small Effects.  But, there’s a bigger button in all of this besides diverting children and adults by sorting details.

USA Today is warning its readers of impending doom and death from a threat in their own hands, or in this case, their own backsides.  Sitting, not Not Exercising, but just Sitting, kills you.  And USA Today cites the research to prove it.  And they do this repeatedly.

Now, of course, it is obvious that no one reading these stories is putting much stock in them.  Look at your window.  Do you see your neighbors running around the yard every 20 minutes, then racing back into the house?  If you look outside, you won’t see others because we’re all inside, sitting.  That’s what you get in a PostModern society driven by science, technology, and education.  A lot of sitting around.  Which is fatal for you.

Thus, we have what appears to be a massive failure of persuasion theory.  Geez, you’ve got repeated play of a death risk that anyone can easily control and no one’s doing anything about it.  Yeah, right, persuasion theory.  Pah!

Except that persuasion theory is working here, just not the way you expect it.  USA Today and most journalistic outlets nowadays have learned that they can attract eyeballs and ears to their advertising through health and safety stories.  People see the Headline:  Sitting Kills! so they pick up the . . . ads.  The persuasion goal here is not Stand Up, but Buy This.  USA Today would like everyone to be happy, safe, rich, and long lived, but not if it means losing readers for its advertising.

Thus, you get this strange disconnect between the Horror Stories in the news and No Change in your Horror Story behavior.  You’re killing time reading about how sitting around kills you and as long as you see the ads, it’s all good.  Persuasion good as long as you understand the difference between Change from Reception (read the ads) to Change from Response (read the story).