The Dunning-Kruger Peak of Advertising
You may be familiar with the case of one McArthur
Wheeler.
Wheeler was a man who, in 1995, proceeded
to rob two banks in Pittsburg, in broad daylight, using no other method to
avoid detection other than covering his face with lemon juice.
As lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, Wheeler was
certain that it would render his own face invisible, and therefore prevent his
face from being recorded by the surveillance cameras.
Wheeler was supremely confident as he had
tested his hypothesis by taking a proto-selfie with a polaroid camera and the
result had give him an image of only wall, with no face apparent.
Unfortunately he had simply aimed his shot
badly.
The story inspired a series of experiments
by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University.
The results were published in 1999 and
henceforth the phenomenon - If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re
incompetent because the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly
the skills you lack in order to know what a right answer is - became known as
the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
In the early days of its existence the
Dunning-Kruger Effect was also sometimes described as the American Idol Effect.
This was because the hapless yet strangely
confident performances in TV talent show auditions were an extremely salient
example of the phenomenon - a cognitive bias wherein
incompetent individuals mistakenly rate their own competence much higher than
is accurate.
This bias is attributed to a meta-cognitive inability of
the unskilled to recognise their ineptitude.
Conversely, many people who actually are
skilled or talented tend to underestimate their own talent, and wrongly assume
that things that are easy for them to do are also easy for others.
As Dunning and Kruger famously note,
"the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self,
whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about
others"
For the talent show hopefuls the sweet
Mariah Carey tones in their own head bears no resemblance to the hideous
cacophony coming out of their mouth.
Part of the problem is the fact that none
of the people around our untalented protagonists - family, friends, colleagues
– are prepared to tell them the truth.
Therefore the delusion becomes even more
entrenched.
(These people, while well intentioned, can
be reasonably described as mediocrity enablers. That's for another post.)
For more on this have a listen to Dr
David Dunning himself telling the story of McArthur Wheeler and the development
of his theory in this episode of the You Are Not So smart podcast.
Anyway, you now you will start to see how
this is leading us into the world of advertising.
There is a point, often labeled
‘Dunning-Kruger peak’ that represents the particular surge of self-confidence
one gets upon acquiring some small amount of skill in a field.
It represents the huge leap from novice to
semi-skilled amateur.
However the deluded amateur, at this stage both encouraged their new found knowledge yet unable to know the
vastness of what they have yet to learn in order to be an
expert, begin to imagine themselves to actually be expert.
This period of delusion is common in people
who are just starting out in advertising, though by no means exclusive to the young. Based on scant evidence they suddenly believe they are much more
knowledgeable about advertising than they actually are.
Moreover, this delusion seems to also happen
at a group level, and envelopes people with enough experience to know better,
which is why I suggest that a large part of our industry appears to have hit some
sort of Dunning-Kruger peak.
The commonly held ideas of those operating
in Dunning-Kruger peak mode are some sort of party-mix that contains ‘advertising
is dead, everything is now about content, participation and conversation’, ‘creative
departments are no longer required as ideas come from anywhere’ and ‘anyone
with a smartphone can be an ad agency’ amongst many others.
Dunning and Kruger discovered that people
who are unskilled at something — in this case advertising — are often unable to
see how bad they are.
Incompetent people will
1. Fail to recognise that they are
incompetent,
2. Fail to recognise how good competent
people actually are.
3. Fail to see the scale of their
incompetence.
To an extent this story is my own story.
Armed with Twitter and grab bag of Seth
Godin one-liners I spent a number of years parroting much of the same
‘advertising is dead’ drivel.
Until eventually reaching that moment of
true insight when I realised exactly how incompetent I actually was.
This is where one falls from the
Dunning-Kruger Peak into a trough* of enlightened ignorance where you begin to
realise that the things you don’t know massively outnumber the things you’ve
learned.
(* In photographers' lingo this is called
the Jon Snow trough, after a character in Game of Thrones apparently).
On the upside, despite being in the trough,
one is now actually skilled to some degree though conversely now saddled with
the tendency to underestimate one’s own skill when compared to the over
confident noises made by the mass of incompetents.
For the adperson to hasten his or her descent from the peak, one
important insight that is best absorbed sooner rather than later comes from realising that the consumers we have to communicate
with spend precious little time thinking about brands, do next
to no evaluation around most purchase decisions, and even brands that they use
and like are trivial in comparison to the rest of their daily lives.
Rather than engagement, conversations or
participation people’s actual buying behaviour is about reducing complexity,
reducing choice and making easier, good-enough decisions.
Our job is simply about getting brands
noticed, remembered at the appropriate time and then bought.
Just getting that teeny tiny bit of attention
needed is hard enough, never mind all the other bollocks.
Like the fella once said, ‘Never make
predictions, particularly about the future’.
Perhaps a wish, then.
A wish that 2015 is the year when all of us in the business of marketing communications – of all flavours – fall from our Dunning-Kruger peak, and recognise that while we have some skills and influence, what we don’t know about human behaviour is so much more than what we do know, and no amount of lemon juice flavour kool-aid can hide this.
A wish that 2015 is the year when all of us in the business of marketing communications – of all flavours – fall from our Dunning-Kruger peak, and recognise that while we have some skills and influence, what we don’t know about human behaviour is so much more than what we do know, and no amount of lemon juice flavour kool-aid can hide this.
