Aaron Shields

Have you ever heard of the city of Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, or the Bermuda Triangle? Of course you have. Why? And why have so many people spent lifetimes exploring these so-called myths, trying to uncover their validity? The common factor woven through all of these stories is that they are endowed with mystery.

Mystery is a key element to all great storytelling, and people love to tell great stories. Hundreds of archaeologists have searched for the lost city of Atlantis, movies have been inspired by it, documentaries continue to be developed, and even psychics have gotten in on it. What is the mystery of their people? Of their lost culture? Of their way of living? Why are we so entranced by something that arguably does not have significant relevance to us? Although our psyche fears the unknown, that fear is balanced by the innate drive of curiosity: we want to uncover the wizard behind the curtain.

Without this element of mystery, our curiosity wanes. When you hear someone say, “I saw the ending coming,” you’re fairly sure they didn’t enjoy the movie, and odds are you probably won’t want to see it either. Mystery is the difference between a Sixth Sense and a Stir of Echoes.

The same principle holds true in business. Bad car dealerships apparently don’t understand the power of mystery. Everyone has heard the car dealership advertisement where nothing is left untold: “No credit, no problem. Every car, every model.”

Great companies, however, find ways to hide certain elements and let their customers discover them on their own. These companies show the tip of the iceberg, but their loyal customers love them because of the depths, which lie beneath the surface of the water.

Not every benefit that your company creates needs to be directly presented to your customer. Even though hiding some of your best attributes may go against conventional wisdom, by allowing your customer to discover certain positive qualities on his or her own you’ll increase the chances of the customer talking positively about you.

Mystery helps provide meaning to your brand; it allows people to learn something about your brand they didn’t know before. If we learn something new about a company that no one else knows, we are more likely to talk. However, if everyone already knows about a particular benefit, there’s no reason to talk about it. We talk and gossip about products, services, and brands because it benefits us; we gain status by providing new information. This basic, biologically-rooted drive helps explain why people naturally talk about that which is mysterious and unknown.

Just look at the word-of-mouth sensation that was (and still is) generated by Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code. This fictional story is chock-full of mystery and controversial talking points. The book tapped into a lot of unknowns and fed our innate drive for curiosity.

Pepsi introduced a dose of mystery when they launched Mountain Dew Code Red. They didn’t start with a full-force, our-ads-everywhere-you-look style campaign, or one anywhere close to it. Instead, they introduced the product into convenience stores, a primary destination for their teenager market, And 1 Mix Tape Tour, and the X Games, allowing teenagers to discover the product for themselves, in their own environment. And, they shared it with their friends, who didn’t get there first.

There are two things sure to kill word-of-mouth: (1) everyone knowing the secret or (2) no one caring about the secret. An almost cliché example would be the popular book/film The Secret, which again plays on the basic human need of curiosity. What is the Secret? Because the movie seems to have a secret that appears to be useful and beneficial, people continue to talk about it and we hear about it in the media. If the film was without substance (i.e., no secret), then people wouldn’t have even started talking. Because there was something of substance, Oprah and her weekly 49 million viewers spent a show talking about the practical applications of “The Secret.”

Three Ways to Create Mystery:

So what are some ways you can add mystery to your brand’s efforts?

• Don’t say every benefit about your business in every business communication. If everyone already knows everything about you, they won’t have anything to tell their friends that their friends don’t already know, aside from how you may not have fully met their expectations.
• Break a standard rule in your industry. Think back to the standard airline attire that flight attendants used to wear. Then Southwest Airlines breaks the rule and let’s their flight attendants wear shorts, a trademark feature of the airlines.
• Steal one from your customers. Listen in to what your customers are suggesting and surprise them by actually doing it.

So if you want your customers to talk about you, surprise them. Delight them. Let them discover you on a totally new level. In essence, give your customers a reason to talk about you.

Learn more about the principle of surprise and the other six principles of Talk in Why We Talk: The Truth Behind Word-of-Mouth.

A Web browser now lurks among the world’s Cult Brands. I know it’s hard to believe. Seriously, how can a Web browser become a lifestyle? A little incident that happened during a lecture should put it into perspective:

When I lectured at an art university last year in Philadelphia, a student brought up the controversy over Dove and Axe—one company, Unilver, responsible for two campaigns: one that empowers women and one that objectifies them.

He asked: “As a product designer, how can I guard against something like this?” I told him that as a designer there’s nothing inherent in a type of soap that makes it required to be marketed as empowering or objectifying towards women; that’s up to the marketing department and the people managing the brand. It’s a seemingly simple question, but one that has important implications for brand development: any product, as long as it’s good, can, with enough imagination, clarity, and direction, be developed into a powerful Cult Brand.

I’ve been using Mozilla’s Firefox for years and never considered it a Cult Brand until I inadvertently stumbled upon Download Day 2008. Download Day 2008 was organized by Mozilla to celebrate the official release of the 3.0 build by attempting to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in one day.

Despite technically difficulties, in the early hours, 9000 copies were being downloaded every minute. By the end of the day there were over 8 million downloads, moving the market share for the 3.0 build up from 1% for beta versions to 4%. Not bad for one day.

I began to wonder, could we have another Cult Brand in our midst?

With it’s first official release in November 2004, the Firefox browser has quickly gained in popularity and is currently the second most popular browser, behind Internet Explorer, with an 18.41% market share. Explorer’s lead is huge, but in the past year Explorer’s market share has gone down nearly 6%, while Firefox’s has risen 4%.

At the end of 2004, Microsoft was unwilling to admit the viability of the Firefox browser, with Australian managing director Steve Vamos claiming that Firefox did not offer any real threat. But, by mid 2005 Microsoft’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicated that Firefox offers features that compete with Explorer.

So how does an open source browser go from a non-issue to a serious competitor in under four years? By embracing the same principles that make other Cult Brands successful.

Open source companies are great foundations for building Cult Brands. By being open, they not only invite everyone to participate, but they immediately position themselves against major market competitors and turn big business into an archenemy.

Open source also forces another hallmark of Cult Brands: collaboration. End users can make their own contributions without back end hacks, which shows in the over 2000 add-on applications Firefox users have developed that are available for download through the Firefox Web site.

If allowing users to contribute programs weren’t enough, in 2006, the development team asked users to submit what changes they would like to see in the browser for the current 3.0 release.

This focus on collaboration facilitates the development of a strong sense of community. And Mozilla encourages and supports this sense of community, making it a key element of the mission statement: “And as a non-profit, public benefit organization, we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives. We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.”

With SpeadFirefox.com, they organize online events, like the Download Day 2008, and provide a community of brand evangelists to come together and speak. At FirefoxFlicks.com there are currently 280 user-submitted Firefox commercials. Users wanting to find other Firefox lovers in the real world can head over to MozillaParty.com and organize or look for a Firefox party in their area. And just so you know, 700 3.0 launch parties were registered.

And, what Cult Brand would be complete without some users branding themselves? One tattooed user, attacked the archenemy and altered the logo to show the fox chomping down on the Explorer E. Another user put a Firefox tattoo alongside two other emblems of the open source movement: the GNU mascot and Tux the Linux penguin. But the branded mark that really tripped me out is a crop circle of the Firefox logo generated by two interns that’s visible on Google Earth.

This investigation into the world of Firefox shocked me; I just liked the browser’s features. But now I’m asking myself: Is Firefox the next Linux?

The cover story of the July issue of Wired, “The End of Theory” by Chris Anderson, forecasts a new age of science, the Petabyte Age—an age where data becomes more important than the frameworks we use to understand the data. The supposition is that with the massive amount of data that is becoming available, you will be able to run statistical correlations on the data that show relationships that exist and that the existence of these relationships will be enough to form the basis of decisions.

This model of the future is heavily influenced by the approach to searching the Web: it doesn’t matter why a page is the most relevant, from the perspective of a search; the fact that it is the most relevant is all that matters.

This is a dangerous path.

Every time I talk to clients about statistics I bring up a study published in 2006 by business professors Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. The study statistically correlated autism and watching cable television. The watching of cable television was inferred to occur at the highest rates in areas where cable subscriptions and bad weather were highest—if the weather is bad children were believed to be more likely to stay inside and, therefore, watch more cable television.

Statistically, there’s nothing wrong with the study, but is it an actuality? It’s impossible to tell. First, the correlation between weather and cable subscriptions, and increased cable viewing must be correct. And second, it assumes that the direct correlation between watching television and autism, rather than something like increased autism testing in areas where cable television subscriptions are highest, is correct. It’s a study that opens questions, rather than solving one.

More data, even Petabytes of data, aren’t going to solve the main problem with statistics: correlations can exist without true causality. The only thing that more data does is provide greater certainty that the correlation exists. But, more data also has a big problem: it increases background noise. In other words, it can mask relationships that are there and show ones that don’t exist.

With advanced analytical methods the odds that relationships will be masked is small, given that the software will likely analyze every possible combination. But, it may create relationships that don’t exist. When a data analysis comes up with multiple results, using the data alone, how can you know which is correct? Is it the one with the highest statistical correlation? Does the difference between a possible error of 0.001% and 0.002% make the data with the 0.001% chance of error somehow more true?

This is the main problem with search engines and why the problem of search, as Google even recognizes, is nowhere near being solved. Search engines assume that the highest correlation is the same correlation you’re looking for. In other words, because most people searching for “Robert” want “Robert Scoble” to be the result, then so do you. Correlation, rather than reality, becomes king.

In a 2004 talk for the TED conference, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about his friend Howard Moskowitz, an experimental psychologist and president of Moskowitz Jacobs, Inc., a consumer insights research firm. Moskowitz did research for Prego to discover the best type of tomato sauce. His research was influenced heavily by a study he conducted years before for Diet Pepsi: how much aspartame should be added to the mix to create the ideal Diet Pepsi. The Diet Pepsi experiment was inconclusive; the data was all over the place. Years later Moskowitz made sense of the data. There isn’t an ideal Pepsi; there are only ideal Pepsis. In other words, there should be multiple categories. It’s this thinking that he took to Prego and resulted in the creation of the much beloved category of chunky tomato sauce.

What would happen if this data were analyzed using the philosophy of the Petabyte age? Either the data would be inconclusive or the highest correlation would be revealed to be the ideal mix. In the first case the data would be useless, in the second case the data would be wrong; multiple categories for multiple taste preferences is the ideal solution. Only by understanding what the data means does it become useful; on its own the number crunching tells us nothing.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with business. The majority of marketing research has been and is still being conducted according to statistical patterns, and, dangerously using these statistics to make future decisions.

For example, imagine a hypothetical, underperforming lawnmower manufacturer is trying to decide what percentages of red and green lawnmowers they should ship to Lowe’s. They analyze last year’s data and see that nine green lawnmowers sold for every red one. The company changes it’s production to make 90% of their lawnmowers for Lowe’s green and 10% red. When it came time to look at sales, hardly any of their lawnmowers sold.

Repeated statistical analyses show no cause for the increase in sales of red lawnmowers. The company hires a consumer insight firm to discover what went wrong. The firm looks at the Lowe’s stores and the purchasing decisions of Lowe’s customers. Looking at the stores, the firm finds that the previous year Lowe’s displayed green lawnmowers at the front of the store. But, this year there wasn’t a display at the front of the store. When asking the customers what color they wanted their lawnmower to be most customers answered red. But when the insight firm showed customers different colors and asked them to select their favorite lawnmower color from the group, 80% said orange—a color no lawnmower company was making. The next year the company released a slew of orange lawnmowers and outsold all other lawnmower makers in the Lowe’s stores.

Analyzing the manufacturer’s data would never have revealed anything. Sense was created from nonsense by coming up with questions to ask and looking for the answers from both the retail stores and the customers.

Just because a lot of data is out there doesn’t mean anyone has ever collected the relevant data. This is exactly what Howard Moskowitz discovered with tomato sauce: no focus group from Ragu or Prego ever came up with the idea of chunky tomato sauce as a type of sauce they would like until they were given the option. And no amount of data would reveal the observation that green lawnmowers were displayed at the front of the store the year before.

Only by understanding the customers can we give them what they want. On their own they don’t know. This has been a guiding force for Steve Jobs at Apple: “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new … If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they have been happy with a year after we spoke to them—not something they want now.”

Observation and questioning gives us insight into what customers want. Statistical analysis only shows what they’re doing and is best used as a check and balance system to make sure the observations you made and the questions you asked were the right ones. Don’t let anyone try to fool you into believing it’s the other way around.

Leander Kahney’s latest book Inside Steve’s Brain, a look at what makes Steve Jobs tick, made me stop, jump out of my seat, and shout, “Are you serious?” It wasn’t caused by a sudden revelation or a scandal; it came from a passage clipped from an interview with Seth Godin:

Not everyone loves Apple’s advertising. Seth Godin, author of several best-sellers about marketing, said Apple’s advertising has often been mediocre. “I’m underwhelmed by most of Apple’s advertising,” he told me by phone from his office in New York. “It’s not been effective. Apple’s advertising is more about pandering to the insiders than acquiring new users. If you have a Mac, you love Apple’s advertising because it says ‘I’m smarter than you.’ If you don’t have a Mac it says ‘you’re stupid.’”

Apple’s advertising is not effective. Really? Are you serious?

On an anecdotal level, I’m sure most of you know someone who has switched to an Apple computer in the past few years. But, how many of you know someone who has switched back? I don’t. Recently I watched a friend, who doesn’t own a cell phone, drop to floor in the middle of an iPhone commercial and start to proclaim how much he needs one.

Anecdotes are one thing and market numbers are another. But in this case, they both show the same thing. The first fiscal quarter of 2008 showed a 35% year-over-year growth in revenue, up $2.5 billion from the previous December, posting the most successful quarter in Apple’s history. The second fiscal quarter results surpassed Apple’s first quarter predictions with a 32.9% year-over-year growth, marking the strongest March quarter in Apple’s history. And, remember, this growth is occurring during an economic downturn.

Surely this growth isn’t coming at the hands of lifelong, hardcore Apple loyalists. Twenty-five percent of our office last year used Apple Computers; this year it’s 100%. We’re not the only ones: Investment bank Morgan Stanley reported that 40% of college students plan to make their next purchase an Apple computer, a full 25% increase in that market share over current statistics, which is likely to have an effect on the work force after these students graduate. And, even Godin has recognized how ubiquitous Apple computers have become.

If it’s not the advertising, then, surely it must be the technology. But, if the history of inventions is any indication, the best technology doesn’t always win. And, it seems Godin would agree. In a 2006 talk for Google, Godin told Google: “What I want to sell you really hard on is not that technology wins, ‘cause I don’t think it does, I think what technology does is that it gives you a shot at marketing. And, if you don’t buy into that then I believe that the company sooner rather than later is going to smash into a wall.”

So Godin’s essentially saying that Apple’s advertising isn’t effective, but technology only succeeds if the marketing works. And, Apple’s obviously succeeding. I’m not sure I follow the logic.

Rather than being ineffective, I’d consider Apple’s advertising brilliant. Most new converts got hooked into the Apple brand through the iPod and the silhouette-dancing ads. These ads are some of the most inviting ads in the last decade: anyone can picture themselves as the faceless figures rocking out to their own tunes. The message is obvious: if you love music, come in.

Once you’ve already bought into the brand, why wouldn’t you want to stand out as a person making the best choice? This is what the advertising for these computers reflects: Apple is the better choice. And, sooner or later, if you don’t already have an Apple computer and you’ve already bought into the Apple brand, you’re going to want one to go along with that iPod or iPhone. Apple stores are even set up with this in mind: try the iPod or iPhone and while you’re at it why don’t you play with that pretty computer sitting next to it.

Apple’s advertising, as I see it, is really a two-pronged approach: (1) invite you in with the iPod advertising and (2) keep you there with the computer advertising. One makes you want to come in, and the other makes you want to stay there, all while keeping true to the brand’s identity.

Ineffective? Anything but.