Early-internet message boards & Smiling Romans: Marketing Applications from historical behavior

This is the first edition of a (hopefully) monthly series that aims to expand my personal understanding of human behavior, and hopefully yours too. The filter is simply a-ha moments and commentary on human behavior from recent & ancient history that remind us there are elements of behavior we can look back on as relevant, even when the world looks completely different today.

I like to think of myself as a curious person first, and a marketer second so while the primary purpose of the below is to inform and provoke, I’ll also attempt to point out how we can utilize some of this thinking in our “day jobs”. Marketers have a tendency to overlook the past and its use as a valid input into how customers behave today. It’s nice to remind ourselves that some things never change (even inside our world that is always changing). This is also part of a broader push to expand my collection of strategic inputs and soften the line between psychology and marketing in practice.

Okay, on with it! Would love your feedback on what you find most interesting.

#1 — What early internet beer messaging boards can tell us about community influence

I discovered some interesting tidbits in a book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, which many of you may have read a while back. One of which I found particularly fascinating and couldn’t help but dig a bit deeper on and talk about here: A few social scientists at Stanford published a study a number of years ago on linguistic change by looking at language convention in two popular early 2000s online beer communities (BeerAdvocate and RateBeer). Over the course of 10 years, they learned quite a bit about how community norms evolve, behavior of early adopters, and predicting lifespan of individual users. You can dig into it more here.

People are most susceptible to language adoption convention in the first 3rd of their eventual “lifespan.” Important note: lifespan is defined not as one’s biological life but their experience with a new platform, community, group of friends etc. Linguistic norms continuously evolve, but eventually users stop adopting new vocabulary. For example, the words to describe the taste of beer in the communities started out as “aroma” and transitioned to “smell” over time. However, older users were resistant to change after a certain point. The same convention was noticed with respect to describing mouthfeel (rubbery vs. waxy).

Why it’s interesting: I read this and begin to think about brands participating in conversation in mature platforms (ex: Twitter) versus emerging platforms (ex. Tiktok). The debate around timing of new platform adoption for brands is (and will be) unending. And while it involves a litany of factors, the above tells us if our goal is to influence change and authentically participate in conversation, it’s clear that earlier is better. What’s more, if we allow a bit of extrapolation, it’s further proof that user interest & attention decreases over time for the vast majority of users. And so, as brands continue to adopt participatory marketing behavior, effective and authentic influence is enhanced by early involvement.

#2 — Humans are hardwired to form & defend alliances

I’m a little late to the party, but in the past few months I’ve discovered Ezra Klein’s podcasts. In particular the episode on helping to explain polarization within today’s current political climate (Why we are polarized). Regardless of which side of the political aisle you fall on, it’s interesting. One of the pieces that caught my eye was a study from the 70s that showed how human beings are hardwired to fall into group identity alignment ( morehere).

Students in the UK were randomly divided into two groups but were told the division was based on their underestimating or overestimating how many dots were in a display they were shown. Once the groups were formed they then were asked to allocate small monetary rewards to their group or the other group. An overwhelming majority of students rewarded the members of their own group, despite there being no inherent alignment with the members of their group. While you may chalk up the reason for this as self-serving it’s worth noting that individual students gave money to the other members of their group rather than themselves.

Why it’s interesting: It’s striking how flimsy group identity is, and how quickly alliances can develop. You can either interpret these alliances as driven by loyalty to one’s group, or dislike for the opposing group. Both are powerful and equally likely culprits if you ask me. From a marketing standpoint, there’s value in considering how you can use this phenomenon to drive brand loyalty and affection. The above suggests to me that exploring what commonalities can be contrived across a brand can help overcome limiting factors like gender, partisan, or generational divides.

#3 — Smiling Romans & Displays of emotion

Admittedly, I chose this one for the provocative sounding snippet, but there’s also underlying goodness. It comes from a book called How Emotions are Made. The assertion is essentially that Romans didn’t smile when they were happy:

The historical record implies that ancient Greeks and Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word smile doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the “Duchenne smile” by Ekman) became popular in the eighteenth century…

The author then calls on a fellow scholar (Mary Beard) to shed additional light:

This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouth that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome…

This supports the author’s overall theory that emotions aren’t universally recognized in expression, and that humans don’t have an innate ability to recognize emotional expressions. In the case of the Romans, the conclusion being drawn is that smiling in happiness is simply not universal. The author then goes on to bolster her point through a recollection of a negative political ad in 2003 that ultimately sunk Howard Dean’s presidential bid. Said video circulated without sound and showed Dean seemingly very angry at a campaign rally, but when viewed in context with sound it’s more clear enthusiasm is the overriding emotion. Had full context been delivered, that 2004 primary might’ve turned out differently.

Why it’s interesting: Based on the above, the clear takeaway for me is that in today’s marketing world, we should be treating emotional expression much more delicately and less as a universal truth. Given that 92% of viewers watch ads on mobile without sound, what we communicate with visuals only is hugely important and often overlooked. If you consider the Peloton backlash, my personal belief is that the thumbnail that caught on in social and in articles played a major role in driving the negative response. On its own, the emotional expression is demure, meek, and representative of outmoded female/male relationship dynamics. There are, of course, a litany of larger complaints with the ad, but do a quick Google image search and the most prevalent thumbnail alone should quickly remind us of why people hated it.

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Scott Bower is a Partner at Current Forward. He is a former agency exec. with over a decade of experience helping clients like Apple, Chase Bank, Whole Foods, and Allstate with strategic brand-building initiatives. In his free time, Scott enjoys affordable art, vinyl, and sports requiring minimal to moderate athleticism.