Reflection is hip right now. Personal and professional mindfulness trends hype the benefits of contemplating and celebrating. For some, the act of reflection might mean meditation or journaling. For marketers, reflection often means building a case study.

The goal of case studies may be to attract new customers, present a new idea or promote yourself to a potential employer. Whatever the purpose, these structured reflections can have major implications. For example, Marketing Charts found that .

But where to begin a case study can seem overwhelming—and what works for one won’t work for all. Sometimes, the best-designed reflections come from good preparation, with wiggle room to be surprised.

What Projects Are Worth Turning Into Case Studies

Kristie Ritchie, VP of marketing at , says that case studies should be crafted anytime a marketer or company tries something new or innovates the brand, product or its approach. Case studies can be crafted for product launches or when project results are outstanding. “Really, anything can be turned into a case study if you have the right information and story,” she says.

Case studies are being used to attract new customers, so they should include examples that are relevant to the audience. “Case studies are meant to mirror the diversity of customers to make it easier for customers to see themselves or their use case,” says Sam Balter, senior marketing manager at .

Balter uses website building and hosting company as an example. The company tapped well-known actors Keanu Reeves and Jeff Bridges to draw attention in its commercials, but then highlighted the actors’ stories to mimic how regular customers would use the product. The average Squarespace user hasn’t starred in a cult classic movie, but, the ad suggests, if Squarespace is good enough and simple enough for Bridges to make a website for his spoken-word and ambient sounds album, it’s good enough for the average user’s small business.

“You probably want to focus on people who are slightly above average in terms of name recognition,” Balter says, but those high-profile spokespeople should still have a use case that will resonate with the most common customers.

When to Begin Working on a Case Study

There are at least two schools of thought on case study writing: Start as soon as the spotlight project or campaign ends, while the details are still fresh, or start even sooner. “Work on it throughout the process by having someone document milestones, program changes and results,” Ritchie says.

There’s also an argument for postponing case study creation. Balter says that the hiatus depends on the type of project you’re highlighting. For example, a website redesign intended to improve traffic won’t show results for at least a few weeks. Balter argues that marketers should consider case studies to be evolving pieces of content that receive occasional updates rather than static pieces set in stone.

When to Use a Template

Reflection is nice, but when time is short, a prepared template for case studies can keep work on schedule. Ritchie suggests preparing different templates for different types of campaigns. “A brand campaign case study might look totally different than a shopper marketing case study,” she says. Many templates will include similar elements, such as business challenges, insights, strategy or tactics and results. Some may flow better as a story than a formatted report.

Just as the same format shouldn’t be used for every type of project, Balter cautions against jamming a case study into an inappropriate template and missing what makes each project unique. Marketers should leave room for flexibility, as special stories can be the difference between a forgettable study and a memorable one. Marketers should include details that may only seem important to an individual client or company, Balter says, because they inject interest into the case study and provide relatable content.

Steps to Build a Case Study

1. Determine Its Purpose

Is the case study intended to lure new customers? Is it for an industry presentation? Determine the criteria that will make it successful. Knowing the target audience and what questions they need answered will drive the content and choice of template.

2. Find the Example That Best Fits the Goal

Use a case study from a particularly compelling client (especially one that is recognizable). If the case study requires reaching out to a company for approval or to learn more about the results, start with a pre-interview. “You don’t necessarily want to set expectations,” Balter says. “You want to reach out and say, ‘I’d love to hear about your story. I work on our customer success team, I’m just looking to learn more.’ Start with something that allows you to get that information without promising too much.”

3. Gather the Basics

Have a team member track core information as the project progresses. You’ll also collect final data and results—anything quantifiable. “It’s good to keep this information factual, so you can take a journalistic approach to writing case studies—find out what’s valuable to the reader and adapt the story to that,” Ritchie says.

4. Produce in a Compelling Format

Some case studies will lend themselves best to video, particularly if the subjects are well-spoken. Don’t push a format that doesn’t fit the content. A technical-heavy case study won’t be visually interesting, and the important pieces may be best communicated with a chart anyhow.

5. Leave Room for Something Unique

As Balter suggests, a subject may give you a one-of-a-kind story. If the case study is internal, Ritchie recommends including lessons learned. Whatever the purpose of the case study, there’s an opportunity to inject something memorable.

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The trial and error of weight loss can feel like a bad relationship. People get their hopes up, then a setback dashes them. A moment of reconciliation rekindles the optimism. But just when it starts to feel like it’s going to work, it collapses, leaving them to start all over again.

Cyclical ebbs and flows have a name in weight-loss parlance: yo-yo dieting. There are 93.3 million obese adults in the U.S., home of a $66 billion weight-loss market. With that many potential customers and so much money at stake, a lot of diets are bound to fail. Like searching for a soulmate online, finding a weight-loss solution can mean wading through many offers that seem too good to be true—because they are. Others—legitimate products—can be overlooked in a crowded market. Effective weight-loss products must juggle standing out, being transparent and remaining engaged throughout the user life cycle. It’s a lot to ask, but a committed brand-user relationship can be a beautiful thing.

Too Many (Bad) Fish in the Sea

Vintage weight-loss ads are an easy laugh. Today, it’s hard to imagine being convinced to swallow a waist-trimming tapeworm or chew an appetite-suppressing gum. It’s great comedy—until you see ads in 2018 hawking waist-reducing belts and appetite-suppressing lollipops. With a low barrier to entry, the weight-loss industry plays like the Wild West.

“This is a difficult area to enforce,” says Richard Cleland, assistant director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Unlike drug-type products, weight-loss products don’t have to be registered. They don’t have to have any prior showing of efficacy. It’s a post-market enforcement mechanism.”

Delayed oversight and an overweight nation make the field fertile for scams. The FTC’s 2011 survey on fraud, published in 2013, found more consumers were victims of fraudulent weight-loss products than of any other fraud covered in the report. The agency estimated that 2.1% of consumers, or 5.1 million U.S. adults, purchased and used fraudulent weight-loss products in 2011. That’s a lot of lollipops.

In its research, the FTC considered weight-loss products fraudulent if they were marketed to help consumers easily lose a substantial amount of weight or to lose weight without diet or exercise. “When consumers purchased and used the product, they lost less than half of the weight they had expected to lose, if they lost any weight at all,” the FTC reported. Weight-loss products as defined by the report included nonprescription drugs, dietary supplements, skin patches, creams, wraps or—wait for it—earrings.

The commission can’t review every weight-loss product. As Cleland explains, it can be difficult to track the products after they’ve been set free on the market. Prior to 1994, weight-loss products were considered to be drugs and required approval by the FDA to be sold. But when Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, it reclassified weight-loss products as foods that do not require any type of registration and approval, which unleashed what Cleland calls “a torrent of fraudulent and deceptive weight-loss claims.”

In the early 2000s, the FTC assembled a workshop on weight-loss advertising, which included a science panel, industry panel and media panel. “The panelists recognized that deceptive weight-loss advertising was a growing problem, despite increased FTC law enforcement and consumer education efforts,” a report on the workshop reads. “To address the problem, the weight-loss industry expressed a willingness to strengthen self-regulation, including the development of more effective weight-loss advertising guidelines and the exploration of a larger role for the NAD (National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus).”

Aside from this summary document, there’s little else to show for the workshop. There were suggestions of writing ad guidance, but industry groups showed resistance. The National Nutritional Foods Association was concerned that a list of what it called “presumptively false claims” would be too narrow, “and that marketers would interpret any claim not specifically listed as being allowed.”

There may be another reason the results from the workshop were limited: The problem would soon grow too big. The summary document only mentioned the internet twice, suggesting the impact of this platform wasn’t yet realized.

“If the fraud in this area is going to be effectively addressed, there needs to be some kind of regulation that would require companies to get prior approval of their weight-loss products,” Cleland says. “There are some self-regulatory organizations—particularly the Council for Responsible Nutrition on the industry side and the National Advertising Division on the advertiser side—that have tried to make an effort to engage in self-policing. I think this problem is too big for them as well.”

CRN did not return a request for more information on the topic. A spokesperson for the American Herbal Products Association, one of the groups involved in the FTC’s 2003 workshop, pointed to voluntary guidance published by the Partnership for Healthy Weight Management, but that guidance was published by the FTC in 1999. A spokesperson for the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus says the group focuses on investigating individual cases brought to its attention, rather than overarching recommendations.

For its part, the FTC is working to combat fraudulent weight-loss products. The agency launched an initiative in 2014 called “Operation Failed Resolution,” a strategy aimed at cracking down on fraudulent products and marketing campaigns and educating the media on how to identify false claims. The weight-loss industry mostly supported this operation, which included fines of approximately $34 million paid by Sensa, L’Occitane and LeanSpa for consumer redress. The FTC also levied the largest-ever penalty against an ad agency—$2 million—to settle a false-advertising complaint related to weight-loss claims.

“[Consumers] have a mentality of, ‘I just want something that will do it for me because I’ve tried it myself and it didn’t work’,” Cleland says. “It’s partly in desperation that consumers want to believe that somebody will come up with the magic pill. Marketers understand the desperation of their clientele, as well as how to play to that market. Consumers that have heard the health messaging understand the risks of being overweight and obese. And they really are vulnerable to those types of claims.”

Cleland says even legitimate companies sometimes join the race to the bottom, becoming susceptible to exaggerations of product effectiveness because of the competitiveness of the market. “The consumers are the first line of defense,” he says. “This is not a criticism but a statement of fact: We can only devote so many resources to a particular area.”

So many dishonest players can give the entire industry a bad reputation, making it imperative for the legitimate products to stand out. “Many industries face the challenge of bad actors who taint the industry through unethical marketing practices,” says Lindsay Carnett, president and CEO of Marketing Maven. She emphasizes the need for proven results, ideally through clinical studies on the formulation of the product. “Responsible marketing is imperative. In the world of social media, this means appropriate influencer disclosures and still utilizing approved structure/function claims from an FDA/FTC attorney.”

Another way to look out for the consumer is to report false claims by other brands. Marketers who intentionally break the rules, Carnett says, are harmful not only to consumers, but to the space in general.

Maybe It Was a Misunderstanding

Even for products with proven efficacy, not every customer’s story ends with triumphantly holding out the waistband of too-big jeans. Legitimate weight-loss products do not produce results without lifestyle changes by their users.

“You can lose weight yourself by just managing your caloric intake and energy output, but you can also do it with the assistance of an aid or remedy,” says Lisa Bolton, marketing professor at Pennsylvania State University. “From the consumer’s point of view, the hope is that the remedy will resolve the problem, and the consumer won’t have to do much else. I can take this fat-fighting pill and I don’t have to worry now about healthy eating or exercise.”

Bolton’s research, published in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, set out to test the theory that marketing weight-management remedies may have unintended consequences. Remedies are defined in the paper as products or services designed to reduce risk and offer solutions to consumer challenges. “In the health domain, weight-management remedies reduce the health risks associated with obesity and purport to help consumers reduce or maintain their weight,” the authors wrote.

The authors had 134 people read a warning about the health dangers of high-fat diets. Some of the people were shown additional text: “Until now! Introducing Chitosan Rx Ultra,” a weight-loss aid that claimed to absorb as much as 60% of the fat in food. The entire group was then told it would participate in a taste test of a new snack. Half the people were given marketing materials that said the product was “delicious yet guilt-free,” and the other half read that the product was “rich, sinful.” Those who had seen the message about Chitosan took significantly more of the snack than participants who only saw the general nutrition advice.

“Put simply, why make healthier food choices to manage weight if a weight-management drug can manage your weight for you?” the authors wrote. Bolton says that the knowledge of available remedies may actually encourage people to engage in riskier behavior or make them less mindful about their diet or exercise. Though marketers may not intentionally mislead users, consumer perception thwarts the results.

Portion-control products pose similar issues. Hundred-calorie snack packs, all the rage in the early 2000s, became many a dieter’s midnight snack-mare. Maura Scott, a professor of marketing at Florida State University, studied the relationship between packaging and restrained eaters in a 2008 Journal of Consumer Research paper. “Restrained eating is basically a definition of consumers who tend to have a relatively more complex relationship with food,” Scott says. These consumers are hyper-aware of the weight they gain and how they approach eating in a social context. The report authors found that restrained eaters tended to consume more calories overall when eating smaller foods in small packages, compared to unrestrained eaters. “The irony there, from a marketing standpoint, was the smaller food in the smaller packages tends to be designed to facilitate weight loss among restrained eaters, or people who are on a diet,” Scott says. “It was very surprising to us that those were the people who didn’t exercise as much restraint.”

The 100-calorie packs appear as diet food, an innocent option for consumers trying to eat in moderation. Instead, their target consumer feels license to consume more. Bolton also noted consumer license—the permission to consume— in her research as it relates to remedies: “Erroneous remedy beliefs seem to reflect motivated reasoning: The more consumers want to believe that a remedy obviates the need for healthy eating, the more they feel licensed to indulge in unhealthy eating.”

A Real Commitment, Flaws and All

Even the top players in the weight-loss field, the scientifically proven pharmaceuticals, have struggled to gain market share. The five drugs currently approved for weight loss by the FDA all face skepticism from many doctors and patients because of their safety concerns and limited efficacy. Additionally, few health insurers cover the products. One weight-loss company, Orexigen Therapeutics, maker of FDA-approved Contrave, filed for bankruptcy in spring 2018. It was a move that The Wall Street Journal emphasized the difficulty of marketing weight-loss drugs, as patients and doctors struggled with the product’s safety risks and costs. It flies in the face of experts who claim the best advertising is backed by clinical trials: Those results aren’t always impressive.

The weight-loss industry could consider looking at obesity as an ongoing challenge, staying involved throughout the consumer’s health journey, beyond the onboarding stage. “We’ve categorized [weight loss] under this category of health inertia,” says Lindsay Resnick, EVP of Wunderman Health. “How do we get people to face a personal health challenge, stick with a plan of action and then continue to stay motivated to be involved?”

Resnick says that healthcare marketers are grappling with a two-fold problem: They’re offering a single message to everyone, despite the wide range of consumer personalities, and the messaging is product-focused, describing benefits but not the work required to get them. “What’s often missing and what you really need to change behavior is more motivational, more personal, more gut-level inspiration,” he says. What’s needed is a better understanding of how to get more audience participation, how to be engaged and how to do so on the appropriate channel.

The messaging needs to be as varied as the audience. Whereas improved energy levels from weight loss may appeal to some consumers, messaging about self-esteem may work better for others. “Smoking is a great parallel,” Resnick says. “I’ve seen these ads on TV recently that show people with horrible disfigurements from smoking. Absolutely no teeth, or they’re talking through a little tube in their neck. That scare tactic works for some; but for others, show a happy message of people who quit smoking, like spending more time with grandkids.” Healthcare companies have learned to dig into claims data, but they need to explore more customer data to find which ad angles resonate.

Even with the right messaging, the side effects and the cost of weight-loss remedies can be rather unsexy. “It’s an advertising nightmare, really,” Resnick acknowledges. There’s really no magic answer here, it’s mostly a matter of emphasizing that the benefits are far greater than the risks.

For benefits to emerge, though, marketers need to stay with the user beyond the initial buy-in. This is where technology could play an interesting role. For example, a company could gamify the weight-loss process or develop a mobile app that pushes out notifications to the user. Healthcare marketers have focused on medication compliance in recent years, and their lessons could drive some weight-loss product solutions.

The healthcare industry tends to take a B2B approach to marketing, having long focused on securing uptake among providers and insurers. A B2C, or user-centric, mindset considers how to engage the customer and better ensure compliance. Consider WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers. The brand is more than 50 years old and is famous for its user engagement, including the point system, food options (recipes for the cooking-inclined and premade items for others) and in-person meetings.

The trickier aspect of a B2C approach is being clear about the science, much of which is highly technical and indecipherable to the average consumer. Bolton’s research also underscored this problem: Consumer health literacy was not being considered in weight-loss marketing. “A lot of companies tend to talk above the market and the people don’t understand,” Resnick says. “How do you break that down into a more common denominator that Joe and Jill Consumer can understand?” The simplest way is to temper the reading-comprehension level of the messaging.

Although consumers are in the habit of searching through product reviews, ingestible products amplify the need for comprehensive marketing literature, Carnett says. Using layman’s terms and communicating via YouTube, social media channels and owned media are above and beyond what many do today, she says.

Such improved marketing can be the difference between another bad weight-loss remedy and a real relationship that changes a consumer’s life. The stakes are high for everyone involved with weight-loss products, and it can feel like a minefield. The brands likely to stand out can’t simply tell consumers what they want to hear, they need to be honest about what’s necessary—and remain with them every step of the way. Even the best relationships require work.

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What ethical questions could a simple A/B test raise? What could be wrong with testing how people react to two different campaigns or website colors?  

Michelle Meyer would tell you: not much. She’s an assistant professor and associate director of research ethics at and says that she doesn’t see the bounds of A/B testing so differently from the bounds of business ethics. “Selling? Yes. Upselling? Hmm. Advertising? Yes. False advertising? No,” she says. 

But as the amount of data online grows, the line between research and business gets thinner. Companies can now A/B test large groups of consumers, and social media platforms can test even larger numbers of users. Large corporations, including Google, Amazon and Netflix, undertake many A/B tests every day, unknown and unseen by the users being tested. This is unsettling to some; many consumers have loudly—sometimes angrily—spoken out when they realized that they were part of A/B tests undertaken by companies that wield large pools of data. In March 2014, Facebook tested about 700,000 of its users without telling them. The social platform gave some users a positive newsfeed and others a negative newsfeed, publishing the results of its study in collaboration with researchers from Cornell University in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The resulting paper, titled “,” found that users with negative newsfeeds posted more negative words, and those with positive newsfeeds posted more positive words. Many users decried Facebook’s use of “human experimentation.” The chorus of complaints grew so loud that Adam D.I. Kramer, one of the Facebook researchers who worked on the study, apologized.

“The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,” Kramer wrote in a Facebook blog post. “I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.”

Meyer found the kerfuffle to be distasteful—not for what Facebook and Cornell researchers studied, but for what she thought was a misled, overheated response by many angry media members and Facebook users. The sample size of the study was huge, but the results were minimal—viewers who saw negative newsfeeds, for example, only posted four more negative words for every 10,000 words they wrote. What was reported by many as a giant wave of emotion was more of a minor blip. “People were wrong on the internet and it was annoying,” Meyer says. , an administrative body that regulates research performed on human subjects, if Facebook had practiced slightly better —notifying potential subjects of active tests and alerting them to potential side effects. Her post was quickly picked up by Wired and shared thousands of times. “We can certainly have a conversation about the appropriateness of Facebook-like manipulations, data mining and other 21st-century practices,” Meyer wrote in the post. “But so long as we allow private entities freely to engage in these practices, we ought not unduly restrain academics trying to determine their effects.” 

A year later, Meyer wrote a column for The New York Times with Christopher Chabris, an associate professor of psychology at Union College, which editors provocatively titled: “” Meyer and Chabris wrote that the outrage against Facebook’s testing was a “moral illusion,” a false choice between releasing a product or atmosphere and experimenting with different products or atmospheres.

“Companies—and other powerful actors, including lawmakers, educators and doctors—‘experiment’ on us without our consent every time they implement a new policy, practice or product without knowing its consequences,” they wrote. “We aren’t saying that every innovation requires A/B testing. Nor are we advocating nonconsensual experiments involving significant risk. But as long as we permit those in power to make unilateral choices that affect us, we shouldn’t thwart low-risk efforts 
 to rigorously determine the effects of those choices. Instead, we should cast off the A/B illusion and applaud them.”

But others disagree and see A/B testing as an ethical risk, no matter if researchers run tests in a lab or corporations run tests atop shared desks. , a professor of computing science at the University of Aberdeen and chief scientist of Arria NLG, teaches the Facebook study to his students as something to avoid. It was unethical, he says. “I would certainly never accept that as an academic research project,” Reiter says. “It’s not acceptable to me to manipulate people’s emotion. That is not acceptable without informed consent.”

Informed consent is the heart of modern research ethics, Reiter says. In 2017, he struggled with an A/B test proposal for this reason. He was asked to approve a project by a researcher who was working with a real-world service provider; they wanted to test different strategies on different clients, then evaluate the results. that he knew these real-world tests can be helpful, but he also knew that they exist in ethical gray areas. He wasn’t quite sure how to ask participants for informed consent. If researchers were transparent, they might bias the participants and ruin the test; if the researchers weren’t transparent, he didn’t believe that the testing would be ethical. 

“We decided to go with allowing [participants] to opt out and be transparent after the fact,” he says, meaning the study was explained to participants after they were tested. “Academically, I think that it’s the right thing to do, and I think that companies might also consider going down that path because, otherwise, it’s a danger to blow up in their face.”

Most companies solve this issue by avoiding it. They don’t ask for informed consent from the users whom they A/B test; at most, they inform users of potential tests in agreements users sign when they join. These agreements are filled with fine print and legalese; no one reads them, Reiter says. Users click away without even glancing at the fine print, thereby allowing companies to test their data and send it along to third-party aggregators. Reiter says that researchers need to hold themselves to a higher standard than this, but he believes that businesses should, too. Most companies decide their testing policies in terms of what will or won’t get them sued, he says, but to not account for ethics is to activate a ticking time bomb that he believes will destroy a company’s reputation. 

Ethics don’t lend themselves to binary choices, Meyer says. Ethical marketers, like researchers, will always be faced with tough choices. —the U.S. rule of ethics that oversees biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects—guides researchers toward more ethical choices, but situational standards may be applied differently on each test. And even so, the Common Rule doesn’t apply to corporations. Companies that can afford ethical consultants might hire them for tough decisions, but those without the budget should also consider the ramifications of their testing. 

There are obvious fault lines of A/B testing that marketers will encounter: A/B testing an alcohol brand on the Facebook fans of Alcoholics Anonymous is unethical to its core, whereas A/B testing two different headlines on the same marketing email is as benign as a single drop of rain. As Meyer noted, this is Business Ethics 101. 

There are many reasons why consumers might object to A/B testing, Meyer says: objections to randomization, a feeling of unfairness or inequality, an assumption that businesses already know what will work. But she doesn’t believe that it’s logically consistent to be against A/B testing just because it tests two different things. CEOs often decide to launch one product to market without testing—essentially a “B test.” Meyer says that she doesn’t believe anyone would be angry at the CEO of that company for giving consumers a B test without consent. 

“So why is the moral world shook upside down if half of people get A and half of people get B?” she asks. “That’s a bit of a mystery.”

What would be a change is more transparency, similar to what Reiter opted for in his academic A/B test. Meyer, like Reiter, says that companies should assuage consumer concerns by creating a landing page that explains the ongoing A/B tests to them. This page would be a simple explanation about why the company is showing users multiple versions of the same page. Reiter says that users should also be given the right to opt out if they don’t want their data to be used as part of an A/B test, and he says that they should be informed as to how their data is being protected.

The alternative, of course, is to do nothing. This is what most companies do, save for a note when users sign up for their services. If users find out they’re being tested, they may be angry or they may not care. “It’s a dilemma,” Meyer says. 

Reiter says that much of this dilemma can be solved with transparency, to inform users of the test. If users complain, then he says that the company should change its future tests. 

“If you don’t do it then it’s going to blow up in your face sooner or later,” he says. “As an academic, we tell people, ‘You’ve got to [test] properly. And if you try to hide that you are doing it, you’ll eventually get found out, and it will be a lot worse.’” 

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​A Swedish professor with sandy hair and thick-rimmed glasses sprays the scent of coffee in one shop, bumps a customer in the back in another and tells customers in a third shop that they can’t touch the merchandise. Across Sweden, he creates offbeat atmospheres—at gas stations, retail stores, telecom companies, furniture dealers—and studies how customers react, watching for a pattern. Did customers spend more time in a store if it smelled like coffee? Did a bump make shoppers tense? Does the inability to touch an item make them want to buy it? As the answers to these questions pile up, the professor hopes to find a . The professor—, a research professor of marketing at Sweden’s Karlstad Business School—reports the results to the businesses he’s studying. If the signal is strong, he writes about the results and submits his research to an academic journal. . 

Gustafsson has earned unique access to businesses by visiting with dozens of decision-makers each week; “It’s like hanging out with friends,” he says. He’ll push his friends on their beliefs: “Do you really think that what you’re doing is effective?” is a common question, he says. Sometimes his friends ask him to prove them wrong. They ask him to study their stores.  

In 2010, managers at a furniture dealer in Karlstad, Sweden—Gustafsson carefully avoids referring to the company by name, as store managers didn’t want their store to be attached to the resulting study—asked him to study whether sales can be affected by store greeters. 

Most U.S. shoppers are familiar with greeters. They can easily recall the image of a smiling, aged face at the front of Walmart, offering help and sometimes an eye of suspicion. But greeters have been largely unknown in Sweden, a low-theft country populated by people averse to small talk. In 2010, the furniture dealer—like most businesses—was trying to escape the chomping maw of the Great Recession. If front-line employees are one of the first jobs to disappear amid flagging sales, do customers miss seeing them? When they disappear, do sales also disappear? Gustafsson set up an experiment to find out. 

He recruited three other researchers for the experiment: Nancy Sirianni and Christine Ringler, consumer behavior doctoral students whom he met while teaching as a visiting professor at Arizona State University, and Tobias Otterbring, a research assistant and soon-to-be psychology doctoral student whom he met at Karlstad University. Going into the field study, the researchers were all excited by the prospect of watching how atmospheric manipulations affect the behavior of customers. The results from field tests are more convincing than data gleaned in the controlled setting of the lab, Otterbring says. Field results feel more real. 

Researchers began their field test early on a Saturday by watching customers walk into the furniture dealer. There was no greeter in place yet; customers came and went, surveyed by research assistants as they left. The assistants asked simple questions: How old are you? How much did you spend? Later in the day, graduate students—some male, some female—would dress in store-branded yellow shirts, stand just inside the front entrance of the store and welcome customers. “Hej,” they’d say. On Sundays, the greeter stood in front of the store early—researchers switched times to control for any changes caused by passing hours. Again, research assistants would stop these customers and ask them about their age and how much they spent. But they also asked about the greeter—did the shoppers notice the greeter on the way inside? The research assistants asked to photograph shoppers’ receipts; most shoppers obliged and were given a coupon to the furniture dealer’s food court. Shoppers didn’t know what researchers were studying, Sirianni says, only that they were asked questions and received free meatballs. Though the customers were happy, the initial results frustrated the researchers. They put the data through a statistical program and found little of significance. But an odd signal peeked through the noise. Never mind, Gustafsson thought—it was just field noise, the ghost of a busy atmosphere howling through the data. 

Data culled in field tests are often complicated by noise, which could be unexpectedly heavy foot traffic on a random Wednesday, a flickering overhead light or pouring rain that keeps customers at home. Noise could even be something ineffable—the way people feel, the mood of a store, the attitude of a city. The atmosphere, which Gustafsson carefully tweaks, will always be noisy. Despite the noise, researchers can find unexpected signals during field tests. If they measure carefully, they can find bits of information that would have never been found in a lab. 

In those cases, Gustafsson says that he must follow the data. 

At the front of the furniture dealer, the noise seemed to come from male shoppers’ reactions to a specific greeter, a skyscraper of a man with thick thighs and muscular shoulders. In the name of following the data, the researchers ran more tests; they outfitted greeters with eye-tracking spectacles to watch where customers looked. Researchers noticed that the presence of the muscular male greeter affected men in a strange way: The eye trackers showed that the men gawked at his chest and shoulders, then spent more money in the store. When this greeter was present, men spent 131% more than women, researchers found. Women looked at his eyes and moved on with their shopping. According to the research, women spent an average of $71.55 after seeing this greeter while men spent an average of $165.05. When the dominant greeter wasn’t present, the spending evened—on average, women spent $96.93 and men spent $92.23. “This is crazy,” Sirianni remembers saying when seeing the results.

But why was there such a big difference? Gustafsson wanted to ensure that the hulking greeter’s good looks weren’t the reason why men were spending more. Gustafsson says that they tested a similarly attractive but less-dominant male greeter, one who was shorter and thinner— the signal died. They moved to a different store and tested the effect of a dominant female greeter on women shoppers—the signal died again. The signal from the dominant man became impossible to ignore. 

“That’s when we started to get the notion that this is about something else than we thought it was,” Gustafsson says. Just as he had feared, the study belonged in the domain of evolutionary psychology. 

All four researchers were familiar with evolutionary psychology—in marketing and psychology research, it was becoming impossible to ignore—but none of them were experts. They started digging into the existing research; one study told them that men sometimes use consumption to show off, even when there are no women around to impress. Another told them that men often compete through flashy purchases, another that men are far more likely than women to use consumption to show off their status. But the researchers didn’t find any papers that spoke to the intrasexual competition they had seen at the furniture dealer. Gustafsson knew that an evolutionary psychology framing would make the study harder to publish—it’s controversial, he says—but the signal was too strong. They had to follow the data. The signal in the numbers was the ghost of human history, they now believed, the ghost of humanity’s progression from instinct to intellect.

In the late 1990s, felt disappointed by her career. She was undeniably successful—she worked as a publicist at RCA Records and Planet Hollywood—but she had no idea how to persuade people, a key function of her job. She felt poorly equipped for work. 

Durante wanted to learn more about human behavior, so she took night classes in psychology at a local community college. The teacher assigned books about evolution, such as Richard Dawkins’ and Robert Wright’s . She was rapt; reading those books made her feel like someone had turned on a bright light in a dim room.

Durante soon quit her job and went back to school, first to study behavioral endocrinology, then social psychology. By 2009, she had earned a Ph.D. in social psychology and had published an evolutionary psychology paper titled In that paper, which would be cited 250 times, she and two co-authors found that signs of ovulatory cycles are often obvious in ways even a stranger can observe—the type of clothing worn, the amount of skin exposed. After years of research, Durante became an associate professor of marketing and the marketing Ph.D. program coordinator at Rutgers Business School. ​​

Now, a larger number of researchers bring together evolutionary psychology and marketing research in search of why consumers spend, how they compete and what motives for consumption bubble under human consciousness. From 1998 to 2018, Google Scholar lists 9,620 results when searching “evolutionary psychology” and “marketing,” compared with 131 results from 1978 to 1998. In an oft-cited 2000 paper——Gad Saad and Tripat Gill, two prominent researchers of the applications of evolutionary psychology in marketing, write that applying evolutionary psychology to marketing research can be “illustrated by comparing the evolutionary predictions with results obtained from previous studies, by supporting these predictions with market-level consumption data and by proposing new hypotheses based on this framework.” Evolutionary psychology is another tool to examine marketing, a way to make predictions about how consumers behave. 

“That’s where the study that you’re talking about comes in,” Durante says of the dominant male greeter study. “When you think about intrasexual competitiveness and look at some of the theories of selection about how human mating systems evolved, you’ll see how males, especially male mammals, are really competitive with one another.”

Although male mammals compete through physical altercations and displays of status, Durante says that female mammals compete indirectly with one another by trying to look younger, healthier and more physically attractive. When selecting a mate, females look for males who can acquire resources, according to R.L. Trivers’ influential 1972 parental investment theory. Thus, the theory goes, males flaunt, showing that they can provide resources, and women pick the best male of the lot. In human behavior, this may mean that men subconsciously want to show that they can outspend more dominant males even if they can’t physically overpower them. It’s costly signaling, Durante says; “Look at all the costs I can incur.”

“You’re going to self-present just as you would in an interview,” Durante says. “If you interview for a job as a construction worker, you present all of the abilities you have that are related to that job. And the same is true for mate choice.”

This is where the controversy Gustafsson worried about seeps in: Researchers who study humans as an evolving animal often leave onlookers angry and perturbed. To many feminists, evolutionary psychology locks humans in a genetic patriarchy where men are the eternal breadwinners, destined to compete for resources, while women are destined to compete through passive traits like youth and beauty. To many philosophers, evolutionary psychology locks humans into genetic determinism, a world where free will never existed, and our choices are not our own but the outdated desire of long-dead relatives. Many religious people, fundamentalist Christians in particular, have complained about evolution since Charles Darwin released his landmark study of evolution, —they refuse to believe in a world where physical biology matters more than the metaphysical soul. As Bernard Crespi, professor of evolutionary biology at Simon Fraser University, wrote in a post on The Evolution Institute’s website, many people feel as though the study of evolution is an attack on human goodness and human purpose. 

And then there’s the scorn from the academic community. The earliest and perhaps best example of academic vitriol against evolutionary psychology scholarship can be found in 1975 at Harvard University, when biologist and ant expert E.O. Wilson released his book, , cited by many as a foundational text of evolutionary psychology. In the book, Wilson explained how evolution by natural selection affected animal—including, controversially, human—aggression, morality and care for young, among other traits. Many demurred, believing that Wilson put too much emphasis on nature and not enough on society, selling short the effect of our parents and environment. Academics attacked Wilson in print; Richard Lewontin, a critic of Wilson’s work and his colleague in Harvard’s biology department, wrote that who see modern Western culture as natural because they are “privileged members of such societies.” Protestors began haranguing Wilson at his lectures, accusing him of rationalizing genocide by associating Sociobiology’s biological heredity thesis with eugenics and Nazism. The most public example occurred at a at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Protestors stormed the stage, threw a cup of water at Wilson and chanted, “racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

Decades later, researchers who study evolutionary psychology still feel the pressure, the social taboo. “It’s like a minefield,” says Otterbring, the lone member of Gustafsson’s team who now specializes in evolutionary psychology research. “You have to be careful. But if you find something, from my point of view, it’s better to show people and to make people aware that we, as humans, sometimes have these superficial biases. I don’t think it’s fair to just put all these findings under the carpet and pretend that they don’t exist because then we won’t learn anything.”

The taboo also spawns the biggest misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, Durante says, as many onlookers believe that researchers are testing evolutionary theories directly on humans. On the contrary, she says, researchers are using evolutionary theory to form hypotheses about how the human mind works, searching for the underlying psychology behind consumerism. “Sometimes, the ultimate function of behavior doesn’t match up with the proximate-level cognition that we have,” Durante says. In evolutionary lingo, the proximate level deals with the story of the function, the “how” of what happens; the ultimate level deals with the function itself, or the “why” of what happens. A proximate-level reason for eating a piece of carrot cake instead of an actual carrot may be that the cake tastes sweet and makes us feel good, for example, while the ultimate reason is our desire for the cake’s fat and sugar—formerly scarce energy resources, now wildly abundant. “Those are risky things because we have them now at our fingertips,” she says. “But we still have the brains that can’t stop getting it if it’s in front of us because we don’t have a stopping mechanism. It wasn’t at our fingertips, and in special environments we had to work for it.”

Over many centuries, the human brain has evolved better stopping mechanisms. Humans have evolved a larger and , the part of our brains associated with language, conscious thought and sensory perception. We’re aware that we make choices and that our choices have stakes; these are complexities that make studying humans difficult for marketers, Durante says. We can know our ultimate reasons for eating carrot cake and still believe in the story of our proximate reasons, telling focus groups that we ate the cake because it was so tasty. We’re inquisitive and thoughtful, yet we’re often driven by our bodies and the muted parts of our minds. 

Researchers must study humans carefully, as we’re noise-creating machines with scores of outliers and individuals in our ranks. 

But amid the noise, Durante says that humans give off signals. Evolutionary psychology offers a tool to find those signals. 

The researchers now had a number; 131% more money spent by men in the presence of a dominant male greeter. They had surveys confirming that the dominant male greeter was, in fact, considered dominant. In evolutionary psychology, males are considered dominant—and thus perceived as having higher status and income—when they’re athletic, have a strong upper body and an imposing stature. When researchers surveyed people by showing them photos of the dominant greeter, people responded that he looked like he worked out and was good at sports. 

When Gustafsson showed the initial results to the managers of the furniture dealer, he says that they were intrigued by the efficacy of greeters but wary of being associated with a study on the effect of dominance on male shoppers. They asked not to be named in the research, he says. But the researchers had a potentially publishable signal and had to keep digging. Their finding was a new piece of information for the evolutionary psychology canon, the researchers say—most studies had focused on what effect attractive women have on male spending. And it was counterintuitive; the researchers surveyed 380 people and found that the majority believed that women shoppers would be more affected by dominant men. Their study spoke to an intrasexual competition. “We propose that this heightened drive for same-sex competition transforms the [greeter] into a rival and results in an increased propensity to buy status-signaling products among male customers,” they wrote. 

The researchers deepened their research; they needed more evidence to ensure that the signal wasn’t created by the noise of the field or the presence of the greeter. In a second study, they set up in labs in the U.S. and online to find out whether people would prefer products with larger logos after being shown a photo of a physically dominant male employee. Researchers showed 114 undergraduate students, 51% of whom were women, photos of dominant or nondominant male employees, then asked them to imagine that they were shopping for a piece of clothing. How visible did they want the brand logo to be? The male participants who were shown the dominant male preferred shirts with logos about two-thirds bigger than men shown images of nondominant employees or women shown images of either type of man. 

In a second part of the study, the researchers showed 292 undergraduate students, 45% of whom were women, photos of a male model. They believed that if men were affected by photos of nonemployee dominant figures, they could be coaxed into a purchase by advertisements, commercials or in-store displays. A graphic designer edited the model’s photo two ways, making him appear dominant and nondominant. The researchers randomly assigned the two versions of the photo to participants, who were then given an image of a blank t-shirt and asked to draw a logo at the size they’d prefer. Researchers found that short men (defined in the study as five feet, five inches or shorter, which is one standard deviation shorter than average) who were exposed to images of the dominant model drew logos that were 4.36 square inches—more than five times bigger than logos drawn by tall men exposed to the image of the dominant model (0.86 square inches) and other short men exposed to the image of the nondominant model (0.82 square inches). Women, as researchers expected, were unaffected by the model’s dominance. 

In a final study—of 473 undergraduate students, 53% of whom were women—the researchers wanted to prove that intrasexual competition was the psychological driver behind the dominance signal. They scanned participants’ hands to measure the distance between their index and ring fingers—the larger the , as the measurement is called, the lower the testosterone, according to a 2001 study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Then, researchers showed participants images of dominant or nondominant models and asked them how much money they’d personally pay for luxury items, such as new cars, European vacations and dates to fancy restaurants. The result: Men with lower testosterone reacted with stronger competitiveness and were more willing to spend money on gaudy items after being shown images of the physically dominant male model.  

At the end of each study, the researchers asked participants if they had any idea what the study was about. They didn’t, Ringler says. “Even though we’re asking about employees and spending, they have no idea that it’s about dominance and how it’s going to impact [buying] behavior.” As in the field test, the signal from the lab studies bubbled under the participants’ consciousness. 

The researchers compiled their findings and submitted them, but not before they thought of a catchy title, a wink to a retailer known for using dominant male greeters: “.”

The editors of Journal of Marketing Research approved the paper in 2017 and published it in 2018. In all, the researchers poured eight years of work into the paper. Now, Sirianni and Ringler have their doctorates and are, respectively, associate and assistant professors of marketing at Culverhouse College of Business at the University of Alabama; Otterbring, not yet a doctoral student when the study started, also earned his doctorate and is an assistant professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University. Gustafsson still works as a professor at Karlstad Business School, visiting his friends’ businesses and manipulating the atmospheres in their stores. 

**

It wasn’t long after Durante started her career as a researcher that she began hearing from corporations. Many hired her as a consultant, including a $62 billion consumer goods company. She consults mainly on women’s products for companies that are attempting to figure out how they can persuade women by using evolutionary psychology-based marketing research. Durante says that some companies want to find ways to create a sales forecast model from a women’s ovulatory cycle. For example, if women are more likely to buy pizza at a certain point in their cycle, she says that a brand can build a marketing communications cycle around each customer’s cycle and send her a marketing message 28 days later instead of 60 days later. As Saad and Gill wrote, this forecast works as a way to compare evolutionary predictions with market-level consumption data—if the evolutionary psychology prediction works, its efficacy should be apparent. 

This is controversial, Durante acknowledges, especially among academics. 

“It’s seen as perhaps confirming that women have mood swings or drastic swings in behavior preferences and attitudes that happen within a short time span, and they can’t be a rational decision-maker,” she says. “I have, in the past, got pushback on that particular area of my research. But companies want to find out [more]. Their motivation is the bottom line.”

Companies are curious about whether evolutionary psychology research can improve sales, Durante says. If companies can ethically use this research in a way that doesn’t jeopardize consumer welfare, she says that they’re interested in testing it. Studying evolutionary psychology may give companies an idea of how humans will behave, but Durante says that the research isn’t powerful enough to dupe anyone into buying something they don’t want. And if the research does become too powerful for customer comfort, she believes that customers will let companies know, and the companies will change. After all, she says, the goal of any marketer is to win long-term business, not trick customers into purchases.

Dawkins—the famed zoologist and one of the authors who flipped the lights on for Durante—has said for years that evolution by natural selection is the reason we exist, but it shouldn’t be a guide to how we live. “Study your Darwinism for two reasons: because it explains why you’re here and 
 to learn what to avoid in setting up society,” Dawkins told a crowd at Kennesaw State University. If we’re all mammals courting one another and impressing potential mates by collecting resources or showing some skin, what are our proximate-level choices as consumers? Our ultimate choices? Humans aren’t usually aware of their ultimate choices—the reasons why they want to buy a Ferrari or an Oscar De La Renta dress are always bubbling somewhere beneath consciousness—but Durante says that there’s value in studying why we make these choices, whether you’re a consumer, scientist or marketer. But what about the Abercrombie and Fitch effect? The authors believe that their studies can influence sales in real businesses. In the managerial implications section of the paper, they write that companies selling jewelry, luxury cars or designer clothing could assign “tall, athletic male sales associates to manage the accounts of shorter male customers.” The effects of the study extend beyond face-to-face interactions and into ads, commercials and in-store displays, they write, as even a picture of a dominant male seems to trigger men’s competitiveness and increase the amount they spend. “Thus, because the effect is not limited to face-to-face interactions with dominant male employees, our findings should have broad and important implications of marketing and advertising,” they write. 

But Otterbring says that luxury shops might not want to switch their hiring practices to employ only hulking males. There are discrimination laws to worry about, he says, but also that dominant males don’t seem to affect other dominant m​ales. And while it’s true that many human actions aren’t done consciously, researchers can only explain pieces of the human subconscious. Most of our psychology, subconsciousness and ultimate reasons for action are still unmapped. 

Even so, Gustafsson says that marketers should study this paper and other marketing-focused evolutionary psychology research. Marketers are very good at the big-picture items—competing, building a new market or a new business—but he says that they often miss the small details, the signals that appear in the noisy atmosphere of the store. “These things that are more experience-based or emotionally connected that are more difficult to capture and grasp, they have a big impact,” he says.

People often ask Gustafsson about the ethical and philosophical concerns of driving sales by manipulating consumers, but he points to the dominant greeters already being used at high-end stores across the world. Think about the beefy security guards who stand at the front of Tiffany’s or Michael Kors; they likely weren’t hired to make male customers spend twice as much money, but the store’s intentions don’t change the results. For Gustafsson, these manipulations are a research opportunity, a way to find out how consumers shop and how the world works. 

“We are all manipulated,” he says. “All of these things—scent or music or letting people touch products—they are out there. You need them in the stores. People like these environments better, so they come more frequently. It’s about building an environment that people might spend more time in.”

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Outdoorsman Leon Leonwood Bean developed his now-famous waterproof boot, so he could fully enjoy the tranquility of Maine’s fertile freshwater shorelines. In 1912, he lent his name to a new company, L.L.Bean, formed to market the innovative footwear to like-minded naturalists. For years, the brand was synonymous with camping supplies, wilderness gear and top-of-the-line quality. But by 2017, internal tracking suggested that the brand’s original message had become garbled.

“We were founded 100-plus years ago as an outdoor brand, but we sell a lot of casual apparel as well,” says Kathryn Pratt, the company’s director of brand engagement. VIA, the agency L.L.Bean hired to bring clarity to the message, agreed; VIA CEO Leeann Leahy told Adweek the brand had fragmented and “lost its clear path.”

L.L.Bean struck out to reclaim its roots by marketing the rewards of time spent in nature. The company underscored its “Be an Outsider” campaign with clever and cutesy investments, such as an ad in The New York Times fully viewable only when basked with sunlight.

But this was no one-off affair. “We’re really calling it a creative platform more than a campaign because it’s a customer-facing message that we intend to stick with for the foreseeable future,” Pratt says. “We are on a mission, as a brand, to get people outside.”

​Pratt pushed harder this year. Rather than producing the same all-outdoors-all-the-time ads, Pratt wanted to develop more contextual messages. This change already pervaded the initial marketing, which omitted the extreme exploits of weekend warriors. The outdoors, the ads implied, weren’t just for steep-grade mountain climbers and certified divers. L.L.Bean depicted nature as belonging to all people—even those who enjoy simple strolls through parks with a picnic basket.

But telling customers to fill more of their leisure time with the splendor of the outdoors would not be enough. Some quick calculations suggested an employment-based pitch was needed. Most of L.L.Bean’s core customers worked at traditional desk jobs where they presumably averaged 40 hours a week cooped up in cubicles, not counting transit time. No amount of weekend-focused escapism would change that fact.

L.L.Bean decided to focus on the idea of incorporating more of the outdoors into work. Its still-fresh tagline was appended to “Be an Outsider at Work,” and the brand set out to change attitudes about doing business in nature.

Action

L.L.Bean hired two more partners—brand experience agency Jack Morton and workspace provider Industrious—to construct outdoor workspaces.

But before the team put hammer to nail, they decided to ballast the effort with some intellectual heft, something that would give workers permission to step outside and metrics to make their bosses feel smart for allowing them to do so. 

Workplace design specialist Leigh Stringer produced a handbook on how America spends its time and the benefits of working outdoors. Citing a report by John Spengler of the Harvard School of Public Health, Stringer wrote that most people spend 95% of their lives indoors, with half of that time confined to an indoor workspace. L.L.Bean’s original research found that 96% of employees supported working outside more often.Stringer culled facts on the business benefits of working outside in spurts to add to the reports, finding that 92% of people are happier working outside rather than inside.

“We would be better at our desk jobs if we got outside more during the work week,” says Ben Grossman, Jack Morton SVP and group strategy director, who led the project. “When we go outside during the work day, we end up being more productive. We also get fresher ideas. 
 Obviously, happiness is a huge part of corporate culture. We’re better at everything when we’re in a positive state of mind.”

Armed with research supporting its mission to bring more of the outdoors to office life, the team created a microsite dedicated to the “Be an Outsider at Work” campaign. The website included the handbook and a set of tips workers could use to fit more nature into their day while maintaining, or even increasing, productivity.

“We wanted to give people little ways to work outside every day, and that can be as simple as taking something like an interview and making it an outer-view,” Grossman says. “Or if you’re going to host a brainstorm session, consider it a fresh-air opportunity to bring fresh ideas.”

All this was a prelude to the campaign’s piece de resistance: a tour of pop-up outdoor coworking spaces in select cities. Led by Industrious, L.L.Bean set up fully operational offices in urban parks with high foot traffic. The offices were complete with docking stations and whiteboards for group strategizing.

The initial event kicked off in New York City’s Madison Square Park on June 21, and despite early reports of uncooperative weather, the sun shone brightly throughout the day.

The pop-ups were replicated over the summer in neighborhoods of Boston and Madison, Wisconsin—both cities where L.L.Bean recently opened new stores—as well as Philadelphia.

Equally illustrative of L.L.Bean’s goals in this campaign was the omission of a traditional marketing action: hawking merchandise. Rather than tie the campaign to specific apparel, executives decided to make no direct mention of L.L.Bean products.

“We thought about ways to integrate product, but we backed away from that pretty quickly,” Pratt says. “We felt confident we had other marketing channels to focus on the products and that the goal of this campaign, in particular, was at a higher level. It was about getting people outside.”

Results

L.L.Bean built it, and people came. By the end of the tour, employees from Google, IBM, McKinsey, Superfly, Blue Apron and Pinterest all booked space in the outdoor offices, along with several other people who passed by the outdoor offices. Some spaces accommodated 25 employees, others closer to 50—all performed at near capacity.

The campaign became a media darling and social media sensation. Viral sharing—powered largely through a partnership with social news site NowThis—reached more than 200,000 digital engagements and digital videos were viewed 2.5 million times. Along with steady coverage in trade publications, the campaign wound up on the front page of USA Today, the most-circulated newspaper in the country. 

“USA Today was a huge win,” says Pratt, who drove around to convenience stores to buy as many copies as she could find to distribute to L.L.Bean leadership. “Knowing the reach that USA Today has and the alignment their readership has with our target audience, we knew our message was going to get to the right people.”​​

The traction created by the experiential campaign overperformed a small media investment. “We actually didn’t have significant paid media against it,” Pratt says. “The primary metric that we set going into this campaign was earned media, and we delivered above and beyond.”

L.L.Bean’s push for outdoor working has continued even after the pop-up tour ended. The mircosite remains live, and partner agency Jack Morton even created a permanent outdoor workspace in its own headquarters.

While the future messaging of “Be an Outsider at Work” is uncertain, L.L.Bean will surely continue to align itself with spending time in the outdoors. The brand is partnering with the National Parks Foundation and brainstorming ideas on how to bring the partnership to life. Future action will likely complement L.L.Bean’s already up-and-running outdoor discovery programs, paid clinics where customers can learn outdoor activities and survival skills.

These actions, brand strategists believe, can help the company develop an intense following that surpasses the devotion of people just shopping for quality products. 

“People are no longer looking for brands that are in the world just to sell us things,” Grossman says. “Our expectations of brands are increasingly that they have a point of view and that they’re creating a positive change in the world. It’s an important lesson for marketers to learn that the way to get the register to ring is not always necessarily by saying, ‘Buy this product.’ Sometimes it’s by saying, ‘Believe in this movement.’ That’s what L.L.Bean has exhibited.”

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The literature on growth is vast, but almost all of it presumes that growth is a matter of following well-known principles of business as usual. This succeeds when growth is found in comfortable places. For decades, this has been the case, but it is true no longer.

Growth has not been squeezed out by adverse conditions. Rather, growth has shifted to places beyond the reach of companies unable or unwilling to get uncomfortable.

Growth in uncomfortable places is the clarifying lens that companies must bring to planning for the future. Thus, it is critical to know more about uncomfortable places. Five key facts about the global marketplace bring this into sharper focus.

Fact No. 1 is that real income per capita grew 43% from 1980 to 2016 for the middle four income deciles of the global population, according to the “.” Essentially, this is the traditional middle-class. Contrast this with the bottom half of the population, which enjoyed 94% real income growth over that same period. In other words, the strongest growth is outside the traditional comfort zone. It’s true that incumbent brands have doubled down on this emerging middle class, but it’s not the same consumer.

Moreover, the top 10% of the income distribution grew 70% over this period. So growth is strongest at the top and the bottom. This idea of an hourglass economy is not new, yet the disappearance of a robust middle-class mass market is something that many brands have yet to adapt to.

Economic bifurcation is emblematic of the broader splintering of the mass market into niches of all sorts, including economics, culture, religion, identity, social engagement and—especially nowadays—politics. Every splinter requires a different strategy, and this is uncomfortable because it means grounding the economics of scale in a conglomeration of distinctive niches rather than the efficiencies of mass production and mass marketing.

Fact No. 2 is that in the , for the first time ever, global trust declined year over year for all four of the institutions tracked—government, media, NGOs and business. The 2018 report was more of the same. Over the past decade, there has been an inversion of trust globally from institutions to individuals, from the status quo to reformers, from official statements to leaked information, from data to personal experience, from politeness to bluntness, from advertising to social media.

Consumers have lost connection with a broad, shared narrative and are turning instead to smaller worlds of influence and guidance. The worst of this has been described as post-truth, but it’s actually post-trust because truth requires a trusted authority to validate it, and that’s what has drifted away.

The issue is not so much corruption and incompetence as it is a lost sense of shared interests. People have come to understand that experts and institutions have their own agendas that don’t always protect or prioritize what matters to people, so they are turning to more intimate connections that offer a greater assurance of shared interests. Influence is now found in intimacy, not authority. Brands must find more intimate ways outside the comfort zone of traditional practices to convey transparency and honesty about shared interests.

Paralleling the shift to smaller worlds is an evolving view of digital technologies. Typically, the future is envisioned as more and more digitally immersed. However, the paradox is that the future is both more digital and more analog. Just as companies are getting comfortable with digital technologies, consumers are demanding more human-scale engagement as well, and not simply as a respite from digital technologies but as the very essence of digital engagement itself.  In effect, consumers want an analog upgrade to their digital lives.

Voice technologies are deepening the appetite for analog interactions. Inherently, voice technologies require a conversation at human scale, thus with the rise of voice technology, analog engagement is the coming interface for digital systems. Consumers are responding in human ways already. Half a million people told Alexa “I love you” in the year after it was introduced. A JWT Intelligence/Mindshare study of U.K. consumers found that 36% love their voice assistant so much they wish it were a real person—context for fact No. 3: 26% of consumers admitted to having had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant. Nothing is more human-scale than that!

Human touch is everywhere. Sales of vinyl LPs, printed books and Moleskine notebooks are up. Board games, specialty magazines and Fujifilm’s Instax instant cameras are hot. Greenways are the new byways. Podcasts are skyrocketing as are farmers’ markets, food trucks, cafĂ©s, festivals and coffee shops. Anxious push-back about technology is accelerating these trends.

Not only do brands have to operate more at digital scale. They have to operate more at human scale, too, and that paradox is uncomfortable.

The growing interest in analog engagement is part of the broader change in spending reflected in fact No. 4. Services accounted for 65.1% of global GDP in 2017, according to the . In the U.S., services accounted for 77%. In China, 56.1%, up from 44.1% in 2010. In India, 48.9%, up from 45.2% in 2010. Services dominate in trade, too.

This is uncomfortable for companies that must figure out how to turn goods into services or add services to goods. Service companies must stave off new competitors by inventing new kinds of value.

Nor will services in the future be the same as before. In its study of U.S. consumer spending on services, McKinsey split growth into experience-based and nonexperience-based services. Far and away, experiences were fastest-growing. It’s not merely services; as the marketplace pivots from experiences as a point of differentiation to table stakes, spending will continue to grow for services that deliver experiences. Add in voice technologies and augmented and virtual reality, and none of this is within the comfort zone of business as usual.

The final fact is best described by the title of one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of psychology, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” A literature review of studies on short-term memory, this paper pointed to a convergence of research on seven, plus or minus two, as the maximum number of things people can keep in their heads at any one time while deciding. In other words, human cognitive capacity is fixed at seven, plus or minus two. Yet the amount of information washing over consumers has skyrocketed.

Marketing overload is nothing new, but within the comfort zone of business as usual, marketers have consistently misinterpreted it. The prevailing view is that overload is an opting-out problem of resistance that necessitates stopping consumers from leaving. This overlooks the evidence that consumers love advertising and shopping. Consumers don’t want to opt out. In fact, they want to opt in more, but the ways in which companies force them to engage make it challenging because of finite cognitive capacity. As a result, WPP/Kantar MillwardBrown BrandZ tracking shows brand clarity declining even as brand awareness is up. In other words, consumers are opting in more, but they can’t keep up.

Instead of battling resistance, brands should rationalize and temper what consumers must do to opt in. This is tied to experiences, human scale, intimacy and personalization. All of these dynamics are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. What they add up to is a future of growth in uncomfortable places.

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That’s why technology solutions and services that facilitate customer discovery—social media marketing, web analytics and optimization—are this year’s top investments for high-revenue companies, .

Behavior data is one level of customer discovery, but an even more effective practice is influencing what customers will do and seeing how the changes you make affect real customer decisions. This practice can lead companies to better serve their customers. As Lynn Hunsaker wrote on Customer Think, “Thankfully, many companies have been migrating away from product-centric, month-/quarter-end-centric and competitor-centric marketing toward putting the individual or most profitable customer at the center of marketing design and delivery.”

Accurately measuring the effects of your changes on customer behavior requires rigorous experimentation, but experimentation doesn’t necessarily come natural to most marketers. We’re creatives and businesspeople, not scientists.

To squeeze the most value and customer discoveries from your marketing technology, you need to think in a radically different way and overcome the three biggest hurdles that brands struggle with in marketing experimentation.

1. Getting out of a Rut

Marketers often fall into a checklist mentality with their testing. Testing technology is quite simple at its core: It splits traffic to a brand and measures visitor behavior. Even advanced multivariate technology that tests multiple combinations can limit experimentation to changing many similar variables (for example, button colors, headlines or images). If you don’t test the right things, experimenting won’t change much. If you test what you already know, you will not discover anything new. What matters most is what you decide to test.

Marketing experimentation is the perfect time to “have no respect for the status quo,” as Apple’s “Think Different” ad said—to see things differently.

 (thought tools) can help you see different elements of your marketing message in a new light by breaking down the factors that influence conversion. For example, is the MECLABS Institute conversion sequence heuristic.

One brand that broke out of its box is HealthSpire, a startup within Aetna. HealthSpire wanted to use a landing page to generate leads for its call center. Its goal was to keep the landing page concise and avoid confusion. This isn’t unique to HealthSpire—it’s an assumption I’ve heard from many marketing departments and advertising agencies: Customers want short landing pages. But HealthSpire decided to experiment with the conversion heuristic and test a longer page. HealthSpire hypothesized that the customer would be willing to deal with the increased friction from the longer page in exchange for decreased anxiety and increased clarity of the value proposition. The result was .

You’re not likely to see a big increase in performance if the messaging and creative you test is boxed into what you’ve always done. Experimenting is your chance to challenge the status quo.

2. Having Too Many Answers

We have to change not just our opinions on what will work, but our resistance to new ideas as well. We need to approach our jobs in a new way. Like many of you, I’m a professional marketer. Marketers have big personalities and are great at arguing persuasively in pitch meetings, but arguments and guesswork will only get us so far. To be good experimenters, marketers will need to change their thinking; they’ll need to ask more questions and be less sure of their answers to a marketing messaging problem.

Here’s a perfect example: 15 minutes before the start of an event, I got an email from a junior marketer about a recent A/B test. The results had just come in, and his headline beat our CEO’s headline. Our CEO, Flint McGlaughlin, was just about to get on stage and present the opening session for this event. I grabbed him and showed him the results just to tease him. Flint was humble enough to say, “That’s great. Let’s open the event with it,” and proceeded to .

Society tells us to act as if we know everything, even if we have to bluff our way through. But the scientific method tells us that true strength lies in forming a testable hypothesis and taking a systematic approach to draw conclusions from evidence.

3. Accurately Answering Your Own Questions

Answers with evidence are very powerful, but you have to ensure that your evidence is accurate. Validity threats can skew the data gathered in your experiments, causing you to (very confidently) make the wrong decision. A validity threat makes it impossible to isolate the variable you’re changing—such as a headline or an entire landing page approach—to measure its effect on customer behavior.

One example of a validity threat applicable to martech is called an instrumentation effect. An instrumentation effect might be a page that took longer to render because of something erroneously loading in the background, problems with the testing and analytics software or emails that don’t get delivered because of a server malfunction. You can’t be certain that it was the change you made to the messaging that caused different results or if it was something in the instrumentation you used to deliver and measure the message.

Another challenge can be the rigor of your experiments. For example, journalist  about the questionable practices of Brian Wansink, head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. 

Dahlberg writes, “When his first hypothesis didn’t bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses.” Dahlberg quotes University of Pittsburgh statistician Andrew Althouse, who explains that studying lots of data is fine, but “p-hacking”—when researchers play with data to arrive at results that look like they’re statistically significant—is a problem.

Biases don’t disappear the moment we decide to run an experiment. If we really want to find something, it’s human nature to find it. I drive a Nissan LEAF, and before I owned one, I never noticed LEAFs on the road. Now, I see them everywhere. I could conclude anecdotally that electric vehicle adoption is really taking off, but the likelier explanation is that the data didn’t drastically change, what I was looking for did. 

That’s why it’s not enough to experiment; the way we run those experiments is critical.

“For scientific testing, it’s very important to remove all possible bias that could occur during the experiment. The goal of an experiment is to prove/disprove a hypothesis, not to find a statistically significant result within the data,” says Cameron Howard, data specialist at MECLABS Institute.

Make Data-Driven Decisions with Well-Run Experiments

Experimenting is powerful. It’s the engine that drives our technological revolution. But it’s not enough to just run any marketing experiment and hope to get a result. You have to test elements that will truly affect conversion, take a question-based hypothesis approach and make sure you run a valid experiment to get reliable results.

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ActiveCampaign aimed to avoid the monotony of a large corporate office, so it sought a new headquarters in a 52,000-square-foot office in the 100-year-old One North Dearborn building in Chicago. Original crown molding and large windows hint at the history of the building while new elements combine rustic, industrial materials with references to ActiveCampaign’s fantasy and sci-fi-loving nerd culture (such as conference rooms, named by ActiveCampaign employees after fictitious locations including Gotham, Gondor and Winterfell). In the aptly named “Knowhere” room, one bookshelf doubles as a revolving door, hiding a speakeasy-style lounge for happy-hour strategy sessions. 

Interiors: Eastlake Studios

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Author  and a weekly news analyst for NPR, provides an array of clear, cogent and concise examples of hits, explaining why and how they were successful. He explains why Claude Monet and Edgar Degas hit it big while their contemporary Gustave Caillebotte is an unknown. Yet without Caillebotte, the leading impressionists—perhaps impressionism itself—would be unknown. 

Thompson tells another story about song writer Savan Kotecha, who received 160 rejection letters while trying to break into the music business. Kotecha eventually landed a job as a writer and producer for other songwriters, such as Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Usher, Maroon 5, Carrie Underwood and One Direction. Kotecha’s journey to sell more than 200 million copies of his songs worldwide is instructive whether you are in entertainment or industrial products.

Thompson studied political science and law at Northwestern University. He says he wrote Hit Makers with two questions in mind: “What is the secret of making products that people like—in music, movies, television, games, apps and more, across the vast landscape of culture?” and “Why do some products fail in these marketplaces while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits?”  â€‹â€‹

If you read Hit Makers, you’ll learn that “going viral” may not be as accurate a term as we think—or at least, it may be rarer than we think. Success may be due to large-scale broadcast distribution rather than infectious word of mouth. That’s not to say that things can’t take off in a contagious way akin to biological genes, but there is more to it than we typically consider. 

Reading Hit Makers, I realized that innovation requires more than a unique product or service. Successful breakthroughs often transcend the product itself. How the product is distributed may also be far more important. P&G and General Foods had the coffee business under their thumbs with the Folgers and Maxwell House brands until Starbucks entered the market in a new way. 

I found Thompson’s discussion of uniqueness and familiarity in song writing particularly powerful. For a new song to be a hit it must balance familiarity and novelty. Thompson backs this up with scientific research. 

Many executives like to compare business success with baseball success, Thompson writes. “In both activities, one can fail 70% of the time and still be an all-time great. But the difference between baseball and business is that baseball has what [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos called a ‘truncated outcome distribution.’ Home runs can only be so big,” Thompson writes. 

He quotes Bezos: “When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. The long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”

Thompson explains how the success of cable television shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” have changed their networks and their industries. “Some hits save their company. A special few revolutionize their business. They score 1,000 runs,” he writes.

The story I enjoyed most in Hit Makers was the tale about Walt Disney and Herman Samuel Kominetzky, who became known as “Kay” Kamen. “In the beginning, Disney was not the profit-gushing king of entertainment,” Thompson writes. “His company rarely operated with strong and steady earnings in the 1920s, and those were the boom years for the U.S. economy. Then the Great Depression hit. To go from artist to empire in the Depression, Walt Disney needed a heroic sidekick.” 

Kamen asked Disney for what we would now call the merchandising rights to his ideas. “Let me sell your cartoon mouse,” he said to Disney. Kamen went on to introduce the Mickey Mouse watch, which debuted at the Chicago world’s fair in 1933. 

“Disney might not have been a born businessman, but he absorbed Kamen’s lesson: The art of film is film, but the business of movies is everywhere,” Thompson writes. “Disney described the strategy as ‘total merchandising,’ and the Disney empire was established.” 

If you want to understand why “Star Wars,” “Rock Around the Clock” or Mickey Mouse were all hits—or if you want to create tomorrow’s hits yourself —you should read Hit Makers. 

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Have you ever thought about how self-centered that instruction is? You probably haven’t because you realize that you’d be no good to anyone if you’re passed out in your seat due to lack of oxygen. Sometimes we need to help ourselves before we can help others.

As personal branding has become popular, many of us feel the need to own our image and strategically promote ourselves. At the same time, we wonder if it’s right to spend time advancing ourselves or if our time would be better spent helping others.

I recently read an article by fellow professor . Williams lamented that college faculty members are now expected to be promoters. They are asked to push their institutions, their departments, their courses, their books and themselves. 

The notion that self-promotion can become narcissistic and overshadow other priorities is valid; egos easily grow out of control. However, Williams’ argument relies on the same dubious assumption others often make: Personal branding is solely self-serving.

Like the oxygen mask example, the best personal branding is not a decision between helping ourselves or helping others; it’s an opportunity to do both. By helping ourselves, we can better help others.

 The idea of altruistic personal branding becomes more plausible when we recognize that good branding involves more than just communication. When we build our brand, we develop character and gain competencies. We are most valuable to others when we offer real reasons for trust and confidence. 

Throughout my education and career, I’ve often benefitted from the strong personal brands of other people. I also believe the investment I’ve made in personal branding has helped at least a few others.

​​I met Dan, an alum of my college, many years ago when my instructor invited him to speak to our advertising class. Dan had an MBA and was a marketer for a well-known packaged food company. He gave me advice when I was considering an MBA and later lent me instant credibility with one of my MBA program’s leading professors, whom Dan had impressed on a consulting project. When I mentioned to the professor that I knew Dan, he enthusiastically replied, “Any friend of Dan is a friend of mine.” Years later, the professor remembered me and my connection to Dan when I asked him to recommend me to doctoral programs. 

Now that I’m older and more experienced, I believe that others benefit from my personal brand. I do things for them, such as write letters of recommendation and serve as a reference for job applications. Just as I leveraged my mentors’ qualifications, credentials and connections, they use mine to help them advance in their careers. The time I’ve spent building my personal brand has increased my equity and paid dividends to others. 

Interestingly, Dan is now the vice president of marketing for a large retail chain, and he calls me when he’s looking to hire for his marketing department. He probably never imagined that using his brand to help build mine would one day directly benefit him. That’s the nature of enlightened self-interest and airplane oxygen masks. Sometimes we can help others more by first helping ourselves.

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