Irresistible...

Published in New Scientist 31 July 1999 p56-57 (Article on my PhD research by Simon Ings)

Mix a Virgin and a Selfish Gene, and what do you get? A formula for creating products the public just have to buy, says Simon Ings

IMAGINE you're the director of a major company. You have a hot new product. A car, a credit card, a phone service, a bottle of thin air or snake oil, the details aren't important, but the point is, it has to sell. How are you going to get it noticed in a world drowning in information?

Well, you could try reading some books on evolutionary psychology and neo-Darwinism. Or if that sounds like hard work, talk to Paul Marsden, a psychologist at the University of Sussex. Marsden is working on what-depending on your point of view-is either the ultimate selling formula, or merely the latest fad to hit the faddish world of marketing.  He is a disciple of memetics, which views ideas, snatches of songs, catch phrases, fables, adverts and so on as cultural self-replicators or "memes"-a term famously coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his bestseller The Selfish Gene. Human brains, memeticists suggest, are merely the hosts through which memes transmit themselves. And individual selves do not really exist. Rather, you and your likes, dislikes, beliefs and aspirations all emerge from a soup of memes competing for space inside your head.

Such notions have been knocking around for years among Internet geeks and on the trendier fringes of evolutionary psychology. What's changed is that memetics is now being adopted by a new crowd-consumer marketing experts.
Marsden, for instance, is working with marketing specialists to develop campaigns for a range of blue-chip companies. The name of the marketing company, Brand Genetics, tells you what to expect. In style and language this is Richard Branson meets Richard Dawkins; Virgin meets the selfish gene. And the pitch goes something like this.

• Step 1: ignore the actual utility of the product and concentrate entirely on what really sells it, brand identity.
• Step 2: treat people as passive vectors for a new sort of disease-your brand-rather than as rational agents with complex psychological underpinnings.
• Step 3: don't bother doing lots of research to find out what sorts of cars or soft drinks people really want, simply unleash something that is designed, packaged, named and advertised so that the idea of it will spread like a contagion.
• Step 4: get the language right. Talk about cloning brands and markets rather than copying them. Remember, the news of the death of Diana prompted myriad personal reactions, but only one universal symptom: we all had to tell each other about it. Similarly, the way the tamagotchis spread among schoolchildren has an epidemiology indistinguishable from that of a chickenpox epidemic.

Now for the tough question: can meme marketers ever understand what it is about the tamagotchis of the world that makes them so contagious? Marsden thinks they may not need to. In his research, he aims not so much to uncover the general design principles of contagious memes as to develop a purely empirical method for predicting how a brand is likely to rate in the catchiness stakes. Marsden's starting point is that in a world awash with information, a brand-or meme-is likely to be catchy only if it triggers, consciously or unconsciously, powerful associations in our minds. Like sex and food.

So far so uncontroversial. But Marsden builds on this to suggest that the entire mind of a consumer can be viewed as an archipelago of networks of associations-between words, images, colours, sounds, emotions and, of course, consumer brands they have already been exposed to. Having already developed a software system for mapping these associations, Marsden thinks he is close to creating a sort of virtual consumer for testing the catchiness of new brand identities.

The virtual consumer is in fact a neural network capable of "learning" about the associations we routinely make and storing them as a map of connectivities of varying strengths. New brands (say, a relaunched credit card) can then be rated according to what sorts of associations they trigger in the virtual consumer. Experimental brands that light up the largest chunks of the associative map are likely to be the most generally contagious, while brands that trigger the same patterns of associations as, say, BMWs or Rolexes will be contagious among the rich.

And as a source of raw information about the associations we make, the Internet takes some beating. To demonstrate this, Marsden, working with Johan Bollen of the Santa Fe Institute, set up an experiment in which 1200 users were asked to form associations between 150 common English nouns. Over time, the neural network detected nine groups of strongly connected words from the verbal stew. In this case, the Internet users were aware of what was going on. But Marsden believes there is no reason why neural networks couldn't build up commercially useful associative maps without people knowing, simply from the records of the Web pages and sites people visit.

Perhaps memes are nothing more than a metaphor. Perhaps Marsden's neural networks are, at heart, only a more sophisticated version of what marketing experts already get up to in their focus groups and data-trawling exercises. But if memetic marketing does take off, what then?

If only because of the language involved (cloning brands, infecting consumers), its use by big companies could provoke us to revolt against fashions that we regard as "unfairly" manufactured. Perhaps we will create our own reactive memes of consumer mistrust or use technology to take refuge from memes.

One meme-proof approach to searching for goods and services online already exists. It's a fuzzy logic system called Forager, designed by Daniel Brown, a clinical psychologist, and his colleagues at Applied Psychology Research in London. Forager is currently helping Web users to find videos, skiing holidays and even personlised programme schedules for digital TV. And in libraries across Britain, readers have begun to use the system to choose books they never knew existed.

To use it, you simply describe your ideal book by locating it along scales with names such as Happiness, Sex, Optimism, Surprise. The system's fuzzy logic uses this imprecise information to search a database of books that have also been graded this way, using responses from randomly chosen readers.

By acting on core desires, this fuzzy logic programme offers protection from all those infectious marketing memes-think of it as a sort of condom for the mind. Alas, it also means you have no need for reviews, word of mouth, critics, tribal identity or any of the other consensual processes that create fashion and culture and generally glue the entire planet together. Do we want our artists and novelists merely to address "like minds"? Come to that, do we really want what we really want?
No, foraging in isolation is fine in small doses but is clearly no substitute for following the herd. So relax, let them clone your associations on the sly and infect you with their brand memes. Be that passive vector, sip that memetically modified cappuccino.

Think of it as your contribution to a vibrant culture.

Back to Published Work