Over the past few years I’ve gone out of my way to avoid all manner of movie reviews. Before seeing the movie in question, that is. (It’s fun, afterward, to see if I agree with the reviewer.) It’s a trick I picked up from the writer Chuck Klosterman, who argues that reading a reviewer’s assessment of a movie unfailingly influences the way he watches the movie itself. Avatar, for instance, morphs into a collaboration of James Cameron and Roger Ebert.
But are Klosterman and I overreacting here? How much of an influence do our preconceived notions really play in our attitudes to movies, products, and, well, everything?
Duncan Watts, a sociology professor at Columbia University and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, attempted to answer these questions. I’ll let Watts, writing last year in The Washington Post, explain:
My collaborators, Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, and I have conducted a series of experiments to explore how certain songs become hits while so many others never crack the Top 100. We recruited tens of thousands of people to a Web site where they could make choices about what music they liked. Some people saw only the names of the songs and the bands that performed them, but others also saw how many times each song had been downloaded previously. In addition, we split this second group into a series of parallel universes in which history could unfold many times, revealing how much of a song’s success depends on its intrinsic qualities and how much on peer influence. When participants knew what others liked, the popular songs became more popular and the unpopular songs less popular than when people made their choices independently.
Maybe Klosterman is right. While it may seem obvious that some people or things maintain their fame or popularity mostly because they are already famous or popular, Watts’ study demonstrates that people really do care about the opinions of others.
While some marketers might be thrilled to learn how truly suggestible we are, Clive Thompson, writing in Wired, advocates advancing cautiously with this knowledge. He bases this on the results of the second phase of Watts’ exercise:
Watts and Salganik ran a deliciously devious experiment. They took the song ratings of one group and inverted them so bottom-ranked music was now at the top. Then they gave these rankings to a fresh set of listeners. In essence, they lied to the new group: They told them that songs that weren’t popular with previous listeners actually were.
The new listeners dutifully took their social cues from the bogus popularity rankings — they ranked the fake-high ones high, even downloading them, while snubbing the fake-low ones. Apparently, flat-out lying works.
But only sometimes. Eventually, some of the previously top-ranked songs began to creep back up, and previously bottom-ranked ones slid down. And people in the upside-down world downloaded fewer songs overall.
Maybe the participants sensed that the ratings somehow weren’t accurate and started to wonder about the entire system. If so, this strikes a small but happy blow for quality. It also offers a cautionary tale to marketers: If you lie about the merits of your product, you might suppress demand across your entire sector.
In the end, quality prevails. But an important marketing lesson can be learned from the nature of the second part of Watts’ experiment. The reverse-ranked songs in this phase were merely posited as popular, lacking an explanation for why this music is superior. If you can communicate to the public a legitimate advantage–explain, for example, why the comparative strengths of your service should matter to them–you should be able to avoid the general distrust of the system described by Thompson.
Related posts:
- Social Media Influence Purchases
- The Importance of Live Events
- With Grease, Interactivity Comes to Movies
