Color me dubious everytime I read a pop press report that reveals the man behind the curtain doing a deed that Changes Everything. As my first Rule of Persuasion proclaims:

There Are No Laws of Persuasion and If There Were, Why Would Anyone Tell You?

Those beautifully written press accounts are either exaggerated or false since anyone with a Law would produce Stupendous Windowpanes that everyone could see for themselves (unless, of course, the Queen of Tomorrow maven with the Law deceived with dishonest financial reports which, of course, would probably get caught and lead to jail, so we’d find the Stupendous Windowpane later). But, this one could be true.

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

This quote adds another element that colors me dubious – data miners. The computer revolution has created many effects, but huge amounts of data is perhaps the worst. Consider another Rule of Persuasion and Its implications.

If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. (But simply because you can Count it, doesn’t mean you can Change it.)

Sure, data mining Counts, but the Count may not lead to Change, but rather to General Semantics and confusing the Number for the Change or eating the menu. With these clever caveats front and central, return to Andrew Pole. Could Target target pregnant women without the knowledge, cooperation, or permission of those women?

Yeah. They could. Huge companies like Target do generate an awesome data stream on individuals and at the individual level of analysis, not group. Hit the database, select only female customers, then track purchase and observe when some women suddenly begin buying pregnancy and baby related products at Target for a sustained period of time then stop making those purchases. Now you can make two comparisons. First, compare the purchase behavior just before to the purchase behavior during pregnancy. Second, compare apparently pregnant women to women customers who never bought pregnancy and baby related products; compare purchase history. You will see Medium to Large Windowpane differences, I guarantee it. Differences in what they buy, when they buy it, how they pay for it, what else they buy, and on and on.

Now. Realize that this little statistical trick is not persuasion. It merely finds Other Guys with specific attributes. That’s a key part of the TACT – who does what where and when – but a TACT is not persuasion, it’s the aim of persuasion.

The persuasion here is how you handle this information. This is the analysis of the Local and a computational definition of a partial TACT. Merely having the data does not make the sale which is the ultimate TACT you seek in this Local. That’s the persuasion part, the important part, indeed the only part that really Counts. If you read the long article you see that marketers have been trying for many years to identify pregnant women as special Other Guys. Computers and data mining are merely a new toy for the old game.

What persuasion play do you make with this information? Apparently the Same Old Thing with Target. The article narrates a fun example of an angry father walking into a Target store with flyers mailed to his teen age daughter still living at home with her parents. The angry father demanded to know why Target was sending promotional materials about babies and pregnancy to his little girl.

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Now, this cute little story seems to imply success for Target, but what is the success? Sure, they figured out a teen age girl still living with her parents was pregnant before her father knew it. Stop the bytes! For the first time in the history of the world, Dad Is The Last To Know! But, did Target make the sale? Did Target get the TACTs?

The article provides no answer to that. Worse still, consider the persuasion play Target made that triggered this colorful story: Mailed out promotional materials! Good grief, this is as old as dirt, water, and mud which is to say it is as old as Claude Hopkins, the 19th century persuasion maven who invented modern advertising and marketing. Target sits on the cutting edge of data mining, neuroanalytics, and social media, but still runs Claude Hopkins persuasion plays?

The remainder of the long article is a loopy quilt of persuasion concepts and plays that sounds smart, but is only FauxItAll. Instead of Tipping Points, Outliers, Stickiness, Built To Last, In Search of Excellence, or Switch, it is Habits as the central organizing principle. The Power of Habits is a new book coming out from – Ta-Da! – a New York Times author that explains the persuasion New New Thing, Habit! The NYT is doing what it can to launch this book from their writer including long articles based on the book by said writer. Hard not to move some product when you put a platform like the Times behind it.

From what I’ve read of the Habits book it is well written account of poorly understood persuasion and influence concepts with an emphasis upon Reinforcement Theory. The well written part will carry the book (along with a little help from Times friends). But, if you want to understand how conditioning produces habits and the practical implications of that, you’ll need to do a bit more reading. If you just want to FauxItAll, then you might like it.

P.S. Hey, Target marketing. Consider Dissonance plays in your pregnancy materials. If you do It right, you’ll have those vaunted New Customer For Life Habits!

Donald Rumsfeld, former SecDef under George W. Bush, outraged listeners when he observed that you don’t go to war with the army you’d like, but with the one you’ve got. This in response to concerns about equipment for the military during the War on Terror. From a persuasion perspective I’d argue that anyone who felt outraged at that observation is a muggle, yet anyone who’d say something like that out loud is not a maven. This truth you keep to yourself. As a persuasion guy you should realize you don’t persuade with the army you’d like, but with the one you’ve got. Stated by my Rule:

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

You take what you’ve got, what you find, and what you can pry loose from the Local and with that, Change the Other Guys. Anything else is Blanche DuBois. With this in mind, let’s consider the Obama re-election effort.

WASHINGTON — The White House has begun an aggressive campaign to use approaching Supreme Court arguments on the new health care law as a moment to build support for the measure seen as President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, hoping to shape public opinion on an issue at the center of the battle for the White House and Congress.

You’ll recall Health Care Reform We Can Believe It and that the law now faces Supreme Court review before the November election. Big issue. Big election implications. So, rally the troops and away we go. Except.

Administration officials said that they would much prefer to focus on job creation and the need for clean energy at the moment and that the court arguments were forcing health care to the forefront. But they appear to have decided that they cannot risk allowing the court proceedings to unfold without making sure that backers of the sweeping overhaul will be prominent and outspoken.

Let me rewrite this from the Obama team perspective. I think I can win in November attacking on job creation and clean energy, but not on health care. However, the army I’ve got wants to attack on health care, too. So I will go to election with the army I’ve got.

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Team Obama will do this despite the bad optics of these behind-the-curtain machinations. Here’s how they handle both the unruly allies and the bad perceptions.

Sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations, White House officials denied that they were trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill. They said a main purpose of this week’s meeting, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, was to give the various groups a chance to learn of the plans.

That’s better. They’re not organizing demonstrations at the Supreme Court. They’re learning about each other’s plans. Whew.

Think that will fly, run, or float?

Obama is getting dragged into fights on health care he would rather avoid, seeing better chances with jobs and energy. But thinking, if not talking, like Rumsfeld, Obama is going to election with the army he’s got even at the risk of crashing, falling, or sinking.

P.S. Please tell me you know Blanche DuBois.

You may recall my interest in Anthony Ward, the trader who tried to corner the cocoa market in 2010. Ward’s adventure exemplified Mark Twain’s observation that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes and Ward’s tale rhymed with a story from ‘Adam Smith’ in the Money Game from the 1960s. Smith and partners attempted the same move with cocoa back then and got destroyed. So how with Mr. Ward?

It was something that caught out Anthony Ward, the man dubbed in the trade “Choc Finger” for the way he bought up £650million worth of cocoa last July. That amounted to 7 per cent of all global production and was enough to fill more than five ­Titanics. By the time Ward’s company, Armajaro Asset Management, liquidated its holding last September that bumper crop meant the price of cocoa had fallen by a quarter, losing the firm tens of millions of pounds. The thinking behind the purchase, ­however, was understandable in the climate.

Here’s more detail.

Anthony Ward is probably ruing his $1 billion cocoa purchase back in July. Since news leaked of Ward’s activity, the price of cocoa has fallen by 23% as the market digests a stronger crop out of the Ivory Coast. This decline in cocoa prices means Ward has lost about $230 million. Ward’s investment thesis was that weather conditions would negatively impact supply from the Ivory Coast, which produces approximately 50% of world cocoa production. So far this has not occurred.

Here’s how it looks with a Chart!

Gee.  Global Warming didn’t cause either drought or flood.  Just a bumper crop of cocoa on time and to market.  Just like with Adam Smith and his co-conspirators.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Everything new is old again.  Just as All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere, so too: All Bad Investing Is Sincere. And, of course,

There Are No Laws of Persuasion (or Investing) and If There Were, Why Would Anyone Tell You!

But, let’s give the last word to Adam Smith, from The Money Game, 1967.

Every once in a while, I glance at cocoa quotations . . . I know which side I am on, and the next time someone says there is nothing going on in the stock market, but an interesting situation has come up in commodities, I am going off to some mouse beach and wait in the sun until it all blows over.

If a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing, I had encountered a classic example. Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied. Fortunately (since one can’t reconstruct oneself at short notice and for a definite purpose), I am, if anything, even-tempered and confident in just this manner.

This from Stephen Jay Gould, late Harvard evolutionary biologist and pop science writer. In the middle of his life Gould developed a cancer that then, the early 1980s, had a very poor record of survival, usually less than a year. Gould came out of the surgery and started reading everything he could find about his cancer and how to beat it. He survived another 20 years, succumbing at age 60 to a different cancer. He wrote a rather famous essay, The Median Isn’t The Message, as a result of his survival from that first nonfatal bout with cancer.

I reproduce his paragraph about attitude and survival because it was not true then and it is not true now. As the psychology science demonstrates – again look it up for yourself – a patient’s attitude about cancer has no detectable impact on survival. Gould speculated that a positive attitude would trigger a helpful immune response and that’s a reasonable hypothesis, but regretfully we cannot develop good evidence to support it. Cancer still does pretty much what it does. We’ve gotten better at staging the disease which means we are good at describing it, but that doesn’t mean we can fundamentally change it.

The persuasion point here aims at Experts. Gould by any standard of intellectual achievement stood as a giant on his status landscape, even without a Nobel prize. Note, too, that this giant points to his Expert, a noble Nobel, Sir Medawar. Both men were and remain fabulously wrong on the hypothesis of attitude and cancer survival, yet both knew with an Expert’s arrogant, but friendly, certitude that the hypothesis was true. Neither required experiments, replication, peer review, and the literature.

While expertise is a most useful persuasion play whether as WATTage switch, Argument, or Cue consider not how it affects the Other Guys, but the Expert. Gould and Medawar completely fooled themselves with their expertise and while fooling anyone is rarely a smart idea, fooling oneself may be the bigger folly.

P.S. Gould also apparently blundered in his own science with his book the Mismeasure of Man. Gould thought he detected a racial bias in early intelligence research and went back to the old data to prove it. Except he didn’t do everything he implied and clearly must have made errors himself while trying to prove the bias of others.

P.P.S. Good thing I’m not an expert myself or I’d be worried about this Blog. Everyone knows I’m a jabbering yahoo redeemed only with an occasional blast of humor. Whew.

I spent much of my childhood in rural Missouri which means I grew up with tornadoes. While we never took a direct hit from one, I got to know many at a safe remove which taught me to fear them. Of course, I felt safe because I also grew up in houses that had storm cellars. When the skies turned purple and green we’d have an ad hoc family meeting there without anyone having to tell anyone else.

Now, take my metaphorical Missouri storm cellar and move it to Japan and tsunami survival.

An engineer has designed what appears to be the first floating survival space, the tsunami counterpart of the storm cellar. Noah, as it is called for its Ark-like virtues, can hold four adults, is watertight, but has vents for fresh air, and a small window. It would permit occupants to survive on open water for a couple of hours. Shoji Tanaka, the inventor of Noah, has already designed, built, and shipped some to tsunami wary consumers. He hopes to make Noah standard safety equipment like a flashlight, a flare, or a .45 ACP.

I offer this as a persuasion metaphor for selecting TACTs. You persuade to achieve a strategic goal and select the TACTs you think will pop the goal. People who understand the relationship between goal and TACT (or strategy and tactics) will achieve maven status while the rest of us muggles will complain about these stupid persuasion theories that never work. Tanaka thought about the goal of survival and then the engineered TACT of Noah – small, cheap, reliable, safe, usable. While we have not yet faced widespread deployment of a fleet of Noahs floating on the sea of troubles, this built TACT seems a good start on the TACT.