As I See It: The Unknown Face of Marketing

Many years ago, just after getting a job as a systems engineer, I attended my inaugural branch meeting, where I promptly got off on the wrong foot. The branch manager, whom I had never met, apparently wanted to include “the new guy” in the proceedings, so he asked me a question about the status of a pending sale. I answered, “I don’t know; I’m not in sales.” There was an audible groan from the room and I immediately understood this was not the right answer.

Standing at the podium, the branch manager glared at me over his glasses and offered the following reality check: “Everyone here is in sales,” he intoned, publicly rectifying my misconception. He continued looking at me as if the reprimand could magically infuse me with the information he wanted. But, chastened or not, I still didn’t know the answer, so he had to ask someone else.

Over the years I’ve had occasion to remember his remark, and I came to realize that, no matter what each of us does, on some level we’re all salespeople. Whether we’re interviewing for a job or trying to get a date, marketing products and services, presenting a business proposal, or simply wanting to influence the guy in the next cubicle–for better or worse we are perpetually engaged in selling our most important asset: ourselves.

As many people who have started their own business discover, it doesn’t matter how well you do something, if you are unable to promote yourself. Many capable consultants, independent Web designers, and contract programmers are underemployed, not because they are incompetent at their vocation but because they lack marketing skills. And even those who are fully employed often discover that, without the ability to market themselves, they are unable to attract the kind of positions or compensation they deserve, while the less talented advance because they are more attentive to self-promotion.

What I didn’t realize then is how subtle and even inadvertent persuasion can be. In fact, a strong case can be made that exerting influence largely occurs outside of the conscious awareness of both the sender and the receiver, which is useful news for people who are naturally shy or introverted or who simply find deliberate self-promotion to be distasteful.

The case for hidden persuasion is made by Malcolm Gladwell in a fascinating book called The Tipping Point. It’s about a poorly understood concept Gladwell dubs “social epidemics.” He wanted to understand why something suddenly becomes fashionable. Why does a book become a bestseller, or a Web site gain a national following? How does a software system become an industry standard, or a new computer game capture the collective imagination? What turns a disease into an epidemic, and why do murder rates suddenly go up or down?

Surprisingly, according to Gladwell, it’s not the choices of the many but the actions of a few that tip the social scales. He divides them into three groups: mavens, connectors, and salesmen. Mavens are people who collect vast amounts of information about what’s good and what isn’t, and want to share their knowledge for no other reason than just to be helpful. They’re the type who loves to research the best deals on everything from ground coffee to laptop computers. They read Consumer Reports religiously. In the book, Gladwell tells of a maven who actually wrote a letter to Consumer Reports correcting an error he found in their publication. Mavens, in a sense, are spreaders of good tidings. They find the good stuff before the rest of us do, and are eager to share their discoveries.

Connectors, as the name implies, are folks with access to a vast number of people who represent a variety of different worlds. Connectors know the right person to contact, the one who can open the critical door that would otherwise remain closed.

And salesmen are the persuaders. They are the special people blessed with infectious enthusiasm who can sell coals in Newcastle and sand in the Sahara. For those of us with poor marketing skills and destitute budgets, three such people can do the work of an army of marketeers and move a product from obscurity to acceptance without even having the specific intention of doing so.

Using Gladwell’s model, let’s assume that an unknown author publishes a novel. Left to standard marketing practices, it is likely to sell a handful of copies and quickly be relegated to the scrap heap of literary endeavors. But now let’s assume that a maven happens to read it, gets excited, and recommends the book to all of his friends, one of whom is a connector. Connectors know a lot of people, and one of the connector’s acquaintances is a producer who works on Oprah’s staff. So a chain of only three people moves the uncelebrated book from obscurity to Oprah. The “salesman” in this instance is Oprah, who tells millions of TV viewers that this book is a must-read. That, in Gladwell’s model, would be the tipping point: the point at which the book moves from anonymity to the bestseller list.

But marketing is often much less obvious than overt endorsement, and it works particularly well when it occurs in contexts not commonly associated with selling. The workplace, for example, is full of people jockeying for position, trying to sell their programs and ideas. But since the best ideas don’t always win, what would make a mediocre idea popular while superior proposals languish? Gladwell suggests that the non-verbal expressions of the presenter have a lot to do with it. He recounts an experiment that was conducted right before and just after the 1984 presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. For eight days before the election, psychologists at Syracuse University videotaped the three nightly network newscasts. (Readers seeking a secure job, albeit one with little advancement opportunity, will be glad to know that reciting the news is apparently not yet an outsourceable function, because the same trio who informed us then inform us now: Tom Brokaw at NBC, Dan Rather at CBS, and Peter Jennings at ABC.)

From the videos, the psychologists extracted “all references to the candidates,” compiling some 37 segments, each less than three seconds long. The segments were shown with the sound off to a randomly chosen group of people who were asked to rate “the emotional content of the expression of these three men.” No one knew what the newscasters were saying; they only saw their faces, and from the subtle nuances of expression they construed the emotional significance that broadcasters attached to what they were saying. Viewers were asked to rate the impact of what they saw, using a 21 point scale from “extremely negative” to “extremely positive.”

The results, as Gladwell notes, are fascinating. Rather and Brokaw were almost neutral. Rather scored 10.46 when talking about Mondale and 10.37 when reporting on Reagan. Brokaw tallied 11.21 for Mondale and 11.50 for Reagan. But Jennings was apparently a much more expressive fellow. When he talked about Mondale he scored 13.38, but when his subject was Reagan “his face lit up so much he scored 17.44.”

At first researchers thought maybe Jennings was just a happy guy, but similar experiments with other subject matters, both happy and sad, showed that Jennings’ scores were relatively neutral and not substantially different from his counterparts. “The only possible conclusion,” according to the study, “was that Jennings exhibited a ‘significant and noticeable bias in facial expression’ toward Reagan.”

So what? What difference does it make if Jennings had an apparent preference? Evidently quite a lot, as the second part of the experiment reveals. The researchers wanted to know if the intricate nuances of expression could possibly influence voter behavior. They called people in a number of cities around the country and asked those who regularly watched the network evening news which broadcast they preferred and how they voted in the election. Those who watched Jennings were up to 23.7 percent more likely to vote for Reagan. What that says about the pandering of the FOX network would be interesting grist for another study, but the implications are enormous.

Every day, all day, our faces act like transmission towers, sending messages to everyone within viewing distance–whether we’re aware of what we’re sending or not. Certainly Jennings was not trying to express a bias; in fact, he was reportedly upset when the research results were presented to him. Nonetheless, the impact, intentional or not, was significant. Like the word “popcorn” flashed for the briefest instance during a movie, our minds capture the message and act upon it.

At your next IT department meeting, look around. What are people selling? What are their faces telling you beneath the radar? Why are some people well-liked and others not? Why do we instinctively trust some people and, without fully knowing why, distrust others? When your manager interacts with you, what do the subtleties of his expression reveal? Do you trust him? Do you perform beyond expectations because the movable puzzle of facia that comprise the tiny muscles around his mouth and eyes beam unspoken approval? Even Jennings, the professional paid to deliver information without bias, couldn’t hide the truth of his preference. Our non-verbal reactions to the proposed conversion, the pending merger, the next round of layoffs, the outsourced jobs, the promotion of a rival, the forced overtime, the rude remark, the snub–all of it must constantly be projected onto the screens on our faces, and in all probability is acted upon, consciously or not, by those around us.

Can the minutia of facial expression be your most powerful marketing tool? Apparently so, but broadcaster beware. They say that the face you have at 20 is the face God gave you, and the face you have at 50 is the face you’ve earned. In between, our thoughts and feelings, our wants and fears, carve our features like erosion sculpting sandstone; our history, our judgments, our precious secrets, present for discerning eyes to see.

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.” Samuel Butler said. He had no idea how right he was.