With the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders, we have become aware of the phenomenon of the political, noisy minority. They are the extreme brush we use to paint those even loosely associated with this extreme group. If you lean right, you are assumed to be wearing a MAGA hat and filled with hatred for poor people and immigrants. And if you lean slightly left, you are assumed to be a socialist (if not communist) who wants to cripple the economy and turn over all power and means of production to the government.
In reality of course, neither of these are true. And actually I think the exposure of this bias to the extreme in politics has gained a lot of traction in recent years. This will always be an uphill battle as long as the media continues to be incentivised to only cover the extreme voices on either side, but most people I talk to are aware of this issue in some form. A great site The Hidden Tribes of America (a project by More in Common) has taken a deep look at this problem:
However, working in marketing I see this same phenomenon in the voices we focus on from our consumers. Those who write in to say how much they love your product (or how much they hate it) are truly the outliers. These are almost always people with so much time on their hands that they are spending it contacting a company to share their opinions or they are the rare person who really spends a significant portion of their day thinking about you and your product. And yet, because they are the only ones we hear from, we assume this must be how most consumers feel. Not only do we then form our idea of what our consumers think based on the vocal minority, but we make important decisions to cater to this noisy subgroup.
Just as there are political extremists, there are also brand extremists. A small minority who are fiercely loyal to your brand (or fiercely loyal to your competitor). However, unlike political extremists, these people don’t get picked up by the news—they get focused on by the marketing department.
Marketers and journalists are in the business of telling stories. But more than that they are in the business of telling compelling stories, which in general come from the extremes. “Our consumers love the new flavour we introduced” or “our consumers couldn’t live without X, Y, or Z.” The damage of this distortion is never clearer than when you happen to come across somebody who has purchased your product and you ask them about their experience expecting some detailed analysis of the pros and cons and what it means to them and all you get is something like, “yeah I think it was on sale, but…um…I like how it smells?”
It’s similar to meeting someone who voted in favour of Brexit and asking them why, expecting a 10 minute scree on immigration and Muslims. What you usually get though is something like “I just feel like decisions about the UK should be made in the UK,” and the polls actually seem to support this. Agree or disagree with this, it’s not the radical view most would expect.
It’s not clear how this kind of distortion in politics will be fixed in the future as long as the incentives for news outlets are based on clicks and viewership numbers (which I’ve written at length about in the past). But in our marketing departments, we do have the power to pay a little less attention to the noisy few and instead gather data on the majority in order to more accurately address the needs of our consumers.
For more (I mean A LOT more) on the political polarisation problem, I recommend checking out Tim Urban’s latest blog series The Story of Us