Suppose your business sells something to a customer. Following the sale, you gather no information about them. Instead you send the customer out the door and off into the universe, hoping they will come back again someday. In the time that follows, you make no direct or indirect attempt to determine if the customer is happy with the level of service provided, feels good about the purchase, would be inclined to come back or will tell others about good things about you. In this scenario you have a customer that potentially exists in multiple states. Happy? Angry? Loyal? Profitable? Vocal? Dissatisfied? Disgusted? Disengaged completely? You can theorize about it, but you don’t really know until they come back again. In this scenario, you are engaging in dead cat marketing.
“Dead cat?” “What the heck are you talking about dead cats for?” To answer that, we travel back to 1935, where Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger created a hypothetical experiment now known as Schroedinger’s Cat. It used the following construct:
“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against interference from the cat) : in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none [will decay]; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrochloric acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it”
In short if the device triggered the hammer, the cat is dead. If the device did not yet trigger the hammer, the cat is alive. To the outside observer, the cat exists in multiple states. The cat can be considered to both alive and dead. You can not know until you open the box. Schroedinger was using this experiment as a way to debate quantum physics. Since I know nothing about quantum physics, I will instead use analogy to share what I think this means to Marketing. Here goes…
In the box, the cat was either very alive or very dead. The observer’s uncertainty did not truly dictate that outcome. It simply prevented the observer from knowing. The same holds true of your customers. Whether you choose to ask them or not, they have an opinion. They may hate you, they may love you. You can speculate all you want, but until you listen you can not be certain. Until you are certain, or at least have some probability of certainty, you can’t do much to improve.
Good marketing requires you to “open the box.” Unlike the cat experiment, chances are that the outcome with customers is not an absolute. Rather than dead cat or living cat, customers are likely on more of a continuum — from very happy to very unhappy customers. You need to ask, observe, measure, and… then actually do something to alter the outcome where appropriate and able. The beauty of the social web, search, rss, email, online surveys and other tools we now have, are they make the box very easy to open. People are already out there talking, you just need to make the effort to listen.
While Schroedinger’s cat, if found dead, could not come back to life, opening the box and listening to your customers can bring new life to your business.
Dave,
I think that you have hit the nail (or cat) on this one. You have once again taken a very difficult concept of physics, explained it well, and found a marketing parallel. Allow me to draw another parallel and play devil’s advocate.
Another principle of quantum physics is that of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty. Roughly stated, Heisenberg correctly postulated that one cannot know both the velocity (momentum) and position of a particle. You may know one or the other with absolute precision, but never both. What’s more, is the harder that you try, your methods for measuring the unknown will only introduce more inaccuracy.
Now I’ll attempt to draw two parallels, one to Schroedinger and one to Heisenberg. Using the cat is the customer analogy, the first interaction between business and the customer could kill the cat (customer has a negative response) or release it unscathed (customer has a positive response). That first impression determines the outcome, but unlike Schroedinger’s experiment, the outcomes aren’t always so clear cut. As you mention, if the outcome is not so absolute, your company may need to peek inside the box.
But be careful. Try to know too much about the cat and you may introduce more uncertainty. Try to tweak things too much and your company may second guess itself or disillusion the customer. Probability plays a big role in quantum physics and (I assume) in marketing. It is the ability of good companies to use this information to hit the mark. Those that use the information wisely and to their advantage without being too intrusive usually end up on top.
I love it… thanks Geoff and Dave for a great read and insight.
Geoff,
Great comment. I think I will take a look at Heisenberg and try to write a follow up post in the next few days.
Dave,
I again thought of your post and Schroedinger’s principle today while riding my bike. Though not at all related to marketing, while riding I passed a shut, rather pristine looking, cardboard box on the James Island Connector. I thought, “I wonder what’s in that box?” It could’ve been empty, filled with useless stuff, or something that I really wanted. At that moment (at least to me) its contents simultaneously existed and did not. It was a completely empty package or one that contained a million dollars; neither of which (and both) would exist until I opened the box. I contemplated going back and opening it, and I would have had it not been such a busy and dangerous road. Now I feel as if I am the “cat” inside Shroedinger’s box.
The box still resides on the James Island Connector or it doesn’t, and yet it is both. Had I opened it, would things in my life be any different? Might I be a millionaire? Might the box have contained a bomb (like the maniacal hammer in the story)? Do I exist now or, in a parallel universe, where I was blown up after opening the box, did I cease to exist?
All stuff that I think about while mindlessly spinning (and the subject of a future blog post).