Behavioural Ecology and Advertising Practice
An Evolutionary Approach to Consumer Engagement within Complex Networks
This book is the outcome of my Master of Arts by research qualification. This work is the accumulation of a large research project I undertook that proposes an evolutionary strategy to maximise the chance of survival for brands within this environment, based on the model of symbiotic, co-adaptive behaviour. This study takes an evolutionary perspective on consumer behaviour in an online context. Specifically, it aims to show how such an analysis can not only enhance our understanding of the contemporary online era but also suggest new avenues for advertising practice. The following text is the conclusion of the book but if you would like to download and read the digital book please feel free to download from here.
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Evolutionary Thinking | The Long Dance of Descent
Over the course of this work, the conversation has traversed a variety of topics that have built one upon another. This format has not been without reason as the topic is a consolidation of many areas of study. My overarching aim was to identify a successful advertising strategy for the development and survival of a brand. This first necessitated identifying and analysing the environment enveloping this process - the arena in which the advertising strategy must compete. We were then able to discern the elements of an evolutionary successful strategy that could be implemented into advertising and brand management. I believe that to combine evolutionary theory with advertising practice will invigorate a discussion about new approaches to consumer engagement. These approaches could be applied to all subsets of human activity and interaction; however, given my professional background and interests I have focused on the field of advertising practice. I also believe that advertising and brand management are at the forefront of social technologies and would therefore benefit most from the strategy presented.
Central to my study have been networks that interconnect the biological, cultural and electronic realms. We have examined their constituent elements and the pressures that guide their development. Even though these biological, cultural and electronic networks occupy different domains, I have argued that there is an evolutionary correspondence between all three systems and that each influences the others. I do not doubt that anthropology and semiology have their place in the study of cultural evolution; however, I have chosen to use memetic terminology as it explicitly focuses on the connections and similarities between biological, cultural and technological selection pressure from an evolutionary perspective. It should also be noted that there are many areas of duplication and overlap between the fields of memetics, anthropology and semiology. I have no wish to champion any one doctrine over another and have no objection if the reader wishes to re-appropriate the conversation into their preferred field of study.
The Environment
Our first area of discussion was to ascertain the structure of the environment. The environment is of vital importance from an evolutionary perspective as it is that which places selection pressure upon the entities developed within. Our initial goal was to identify the internet as a search environment, and elucidate the similarities between internet search lineages and biological genetic lineages as well as the selection pressures placed upon them. Each internet search term, when valued in linguistic relation to a past history of search terms, soon builds a lineage that forms a cluster of correlating terms. In isolation each search term has a value, yet in combination these search terms can accumulate additional search value. This memetic process classes each search term as a meme and each term cluster as a complex of memes or memeplex. To return to our biological analogy, memes are the cultural equivalent of genes, while memplexes are the equivalent of co-adaptive gene complexes such as cellular organisms. Both genetic organisms and memetic memeplexes are fundamentally objects that can be identified by their cellular barrier, separating themselves from the biological or cultural environment. Within this defining cellular barrier, each gene works co-adaptively to enable the organism to feed, utilise nutrients and protect itself from infiltration. Similarly a memeplex forms a conceptual barrier between correlating ideas or concepts. Each meme works co-adaptively to enable new concepts to combine, strengthening core memeplex concepts and warding against conceptual slippage.
From there we applied memetic lineage to the interconnectivity between the user and the information. Each search term may be considered as a meme that connects a user to a piece of information. The meme as we now understand is a replicator - it is not the idea in itself but rather the force that both values combinational relevance and provides combinational memory in the form of a lineage of relevance or trend. Each search is ranked by the search engine, forming a rank lineage that can be developed and augmented by future searches that further refine its rank lineage. Rank lineage, as we have seen, shares similarities to genetic selection at a procedural level as they both survive and develop due to selective replication. Whether you prefer the terminology of lineage or heredity, both cultural and biological processes lead to acquired characteristics as a direct consequence of environmental selection pressure. Certainly there are differences between cultural and biological selection pressures, the main difference being the environmental properties of each. The biological environment is predominantly biochemical, whereas the cultural environment is adapted by the pressures of ideas and opinions, including such specific elements as social behaviour hierarchies and profit-driven advertising. As we have seen these latter elements influence group behaviour but are still governed by environmental selection pressure. Even rich-get-richer dynamics are found in both natural and cultural environments, causing fluctuations in favour of certain groups in a population; however, these are often temporary if maladaptive to the health of the population. Dictatorships will rise and fall as will cultural revolutions but all are elements of an evolutionary stabilising strategy. The more parasitic the hierarchy, the more likely the populace will rebel. All hierarchies and ideologies develop if they work symbiotically for the good of the populace. If they do not, they will over time be replaced or adapted until they do.
The Organism
Our second area of discussion involved describing online network groups as organisms within an environment and identifying the similarities in structure and process between digital and organic clusters. A biological organism is a complex of DNA that is isolated from the environment by a barrier. From the view of network groups I suggested that users or nodes are akin to single cells, while groups of users or clusters are the equivalent of organisms with multiple cells, and hubs are vast multicellular organisms. These are the structures that allow us to identify individuals, user groups and large collaborative infrastructure within complex networks. At yet another level, from a brand advertising perspective the node represents a single advertising campaign, a cluster is the continued brand advertising strategy; the hub, the complete brand ideology and engagement with its consumer market. This node-cluster-hub structure is dependent on the interaction of the various elements. Biological organisms use biosemiosis as a process of exchange; cultural exchange, as I suggested, is based on mimesis or memesis. Ideas spread among individual users and user groups within the social media infrastructure. Brands advertise on these platforms but it is then up to individual users or user groups to assess and decide which ideas they wish to retain. This cultural feedback can be assessed by brands, allowing them to evaluate the success of a campaign and predict future consumer behaviour. However now the cultural feedback also guides consumer opinion as groups are able to evaluate and adapt their opinions within vast global networks.
It seems we have reached a point in technological advancement where the individual can be directly influenced by mass opinion - what is sometimes called the hive mind. Neuroscience suggests that thought and behaviour is developed by imitation, repeated performance and emotional engagement. The limbic system working alongside the neocortex allow for senses and emotions to form memories that contribute to our consciousness and understanding of the world. Memetic imitation and memory look at this system and suggest the ideas themselves working in combination form consciousness. The ideas we learn throughout our lives develop both our knowledge and the story we tell ourselves. We now know that when faced with an external stimulus the limbic system in turn stimulates different areas of the brain, which react in combination to form emotions that categorise the experience alongside previous experiences. In effect our thoughts are triggered by external stimuli or a combination of past experiences. Very few of our thoughts are new, and even creativity is often a reconfiguration of past thoughts. The mind is a stochastic system, yet from this random noise harmonic structures emerge. These structures emerge and atrophy, moving from chaos, to form, back to chaos. This process is how thoughts emerge out of the neuronal noise of axonal firing within the brain. If the thought is repeated over time the tendency towards this thought is reinforced. The thought itself is not physically developed; rather the synaptic network is developed through repeated use. This process continues throughout our life, allowing us to build upon past experience in the process of learning.
Thoughts, like languages or ideologies, become institutions of the mind. We need to regulate our thoughts and behaviours in order to work effectively with others. From language to law and order, institutions arise because they are a successful strategy in the process toward regulating social civility. Institutions may be manifest in the world but they are still instituted in the mind. Each individual upholds the ideology of the institution or the institution would fall out of use. Due to the density of social networks, advertising practice has been with us for generations as an institution and has changed over time to suit the environment. This environment is now undergoing major change. Advertising practitioners can no longer get by with direct advertising. Developing emotional contact with consumers will continue but will now increasingly involve a two-way conversation rather than the traditional one-way, presenter-to-audience model. The conversation will become a negotiation between brand and audience, so brands will have to develop more cooperative tactics of engagement. The consequences of poor or exploitative consumer engagement may lead to unforeseen retaliation so brands must view their engagement as an evolutionary arms race. Brands will benefit from co-adaptive behaviour and suffer from maladaptive behaviour as consumers become more conscientious through social network engagement. Advertising may once have been a process of “the spider catching the fly” but now we are looking more at “the web that caught the spider that caught the fly”. If a brand believes it is immune to social media collectivism it is likely to miss out on a profitable advertising engagement and may be unable to react effectively to its audience if a public relations issue occurs.
Symbiosis
Our third area of discussion looked at how we might utilise cooperative behaviour to develop symbiotic relationships between a brand and its consumers. We have seen that hierarchical power and ownership can be as corrosive to human welfare as they are catalytic to cultural development. Networks like communities develop hierarchies. This is a natural part of group behaviour and is as much part of social innovation as is mate selection. Now that most individuals can collaborate in global groups, network collectivism is likely to adjust or replace existing hierarchy models. What we are seeing today is a shift in our cultural ecosystem. Individuals, companies and governments have to shift and adapt their behaviour to match. Our discussion has focused on the social economics of brand engagement but the same evolutionary pressures apply to all aspects of culture. Social hierarchies, when inclusive and equitable, motivate symbiotic cooperation, but when a hierarchy becomes exclusive and inequitable the likelihood of retaliation increases. Sociocultural ecosystems that are divided by price thresholds will always promote social segregation and status anxiety. Power, when held exclusively by the few to the detriment of the majority, is not only unethical but also economically inefficient. Corporate psychopathy and regulatory apathy are parasitic economic behaviours that benefit the few for a short period of time at the expense of the economy as a whole. Significant disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished have often been corrected by collective petitioning or revolutionary upheaval. But the true definition of a stable, efficient and ethical market system is when lifestyle and equality become sustainably equitable. When this is not the case the process of destabilisation will continue until stability is re-established. Culture and economics are both stochastic ecosystems that fluctuate in accordance with evolutionary stable strategies. If we could minimise equity fluctuations we would minimise the costs involved in rectifying cultural inequity.
Applying Machiavelli's principles of gaining and retaining power within seditious hierarchies (1532) to the broader context of cooperation within power plays, I would suggest that cooperation without the threat of retaliation would never work. The evolution of our consciousness provides the evidence of our need for threat prevention, just as our evolutionary struggle with threat avoidance provides the selection pressure leading to cooperative behaviour. Machiavelli himself makes very clear that to be openly seditious is a foolish endeavour. You must be seen to cooperate when in a position of weakness and only reveal your true intent when you have sufficient leverage to suppress reprisals. In effect Machiavellian tactics rely on Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma model as a process of success. Cooperation is ultimately derived from selfishness and is a fundamental evolutionary counterpoint. However, one fundamental difference between Renaissance Italy and the modern world is that of global connectivity. In relation to the co-operator-defector group dynamic, powerful individuals still wish to achieve and retain power but the effects of non-cooperation within the populace can now be observed in real time by the populace. Machiavellian teachings have been used to suggest that selfish empowerment is a safe long term strategy. Yet the degree of malicious deceit used to gain power will be in direct proportion to the exposure to retaliatory reprisal. The choices involved in maliciously gaining power fundamentally weaken the infrastructure of that power base. For an individual or a brand to truly develop a strong and long-lasting power base they must cultivate the cultural and economic ecosystem around them. Prosperity when circulated stabilises populations and further contributes to diplomacy and civil liberty. It is easy to label Machiavelli a malevolent tactician but he merely provided a frank assessment of the troubling nature presented to humanity by its own ego.
We have seen that cooperation is a positive, effective and efficient evolutionary strategy. Of course cooperation needs to be reciprocated for both parties to benefit, so retaliation is a necessary element of such interactions. The efficiency of mutual cooperation often negates the short term gains of non-cooperation. Advertising has used fear and status to motivate consumers for a long time to the detriment of the individual consumer and the wider cultural psyche. Status inequity promotes depression, crime and segregation. Status inequity does not nurture either the society or the individuals within it, but fortunately it is also not an inexorable truth. Companies use John Nash's non-cooperative equilibria or Nash equilibria to improve mutual cooperation between one another. I have suggested this process should be expanded to include consumers by using Axelrod's evolutionary cooperation model. There is no need for brands or their advertising strategies to become pillars of ethical conduct but rather they should seek to engage with their consumers for mutual benefit. As consumers will continue to connect with each other in ever more complex online social groups, brands should acknowledge this cultural shift and respond proactively to engage it. If a brand is to survive into the future it must work symbiotically with its consumers. An evolutionary cooperative strategy benefits both brand and consumers, and has the added benefit of developing a more efficient, stable and innovative marketing communication environment.
The Shadow of Our Future
Perhaps the most obviously pertinent application of evolutionary theory to advertising practice concerns how ideas evolve. In researching the topic, I found one of the most interesting expressions of an evolutionary process applied to an idea involves the idea of evolution itself. Evolutionary theory has been rigorously tested again and again against other theories only to dissolve the competing theories - a process described by Dennett as 'Universal Acid' (1995). If an idea is correct then it will win out over any opposing idea over time. The idea takes on the properties of a universal acid that dissolves all other ideas away, leaving only the truth. As time passes no falsehoods will remain, only the universe and the true understanding of it. This appears a long step away from applying evolution to advertising practice but not when we realise that nature and culture are intrinsically connected.
Memes cannot be measured directly but that does not mean that memetic processes do not affect the evolution of culture. Indeed, this effect on culture may be the key to their quantification. Like a black hole, a meme's power can be understood only by studying the forces exerted upon the objects with which it engages, such as ideologies, language, fashions and other cultural trends. The measure of cultural drift provides us with the method of assessing the extent of a meme's replicative value. Memetics is and may remain a discussion that describes cultural evolution as a process of emergence, survival and atrophy but that by no means diminishes its importance as an extension to the process of human evolution. It would be hard to argue that biology does not affect culture and likewise culture does not affect biology, given the evidence all around us such as infection and genetic inheritance on one side, and cultivation and hierarchical mate selection on the other. We are, at a fundamental level, a summation of our ideas and the behaviours in which we engage based on those ideas. Every day we live our lives and tell others and ourselves the story of our lives. The stories we tell ourselves become who we are. We may believe we are in control of our ideas but every one of them was handed down to us by our forebears. All we have control of is the combination in which those thoughts float through our consciousness, and even that is conditioned by the processes of habit and institutionalisation.
Our environment and everything within is part of a stochastic system. Each element within such a system has the opportunity to emerge from the background radiance of chaos through a process of reciprocal commonality. This is an inherently symbiotic process. Once the process of emergence has developed a barrier between the organism and its environment, the former is subjected to evolutionary selection pressure. If that organism develops to the point at which it forms reactive defence mechanisms, be they biological or intellectual, these defence mechanisms likewise become subject to selection pressure. Furthermore, if an intellectual organism works collaboratively with other intellectual organisms then the group mechanism is subject to selection pressure, and if that group works collaboratively with other group then the cultural mechanism itself is subject to selection pressure. At every stage of this process evolutionary selection pressure ensures that the ineffective die off and the effective survive. This process also elevates a myriad of survival niches that allow innovation and exploitation. The process of evolution is never truly stable or finite and all living organisms are subject to the continual sculpting force of an evolutionary stabilising strategy. Environments, organisms, cultures and the ecosystems that connect them are all in a process of emergence or atrophy. Between emergence and atrophy lies the immeasurable opportunity of replication.
Our ability to cooperate or retaliate is also evolved through evolutionary selection pressure. The outcome of every conscious decision shapes our future in incremental ways. Most of our decisions make very little impact but some can produce profound changes that may affect our future and the decisions of others; furthermore, the effects of choices accumulate over time. Thus we shape our future by affecting our survival fitness and the survival fitness of our descendants, making this an issue of vital importance to humanity. We can choose to act selfishly or cooperatively but we may wish to view such choices differently. For example choosing profit at the expense of the environment seems to fall under the category of selfishness but I would suggest that it could be considered as a choice to self-harm. To be viewed as such this would, of course, require environmental damage on a vast scale. But if millions of individuals chose to profit at the expense of the environment, the individual decisions would be selfish but the collective choice would be one of self-harm. As a species we have the choice to engage symbiotically with the environment or to parasitise it.
Advertising is not only the mouthpiece of a brand; it also affects the consumers with which it engages. Contemporary advertising compounds issues of status anxiety and social segregation but this is not the only approach available. Brands can choose to work symbiotically with consumers and gain the benefits of such reciprocal behaviour. As I have suggested advertising is in a perfect position to shift its practice from seductive to symbiotic engagement. Brands should be proud of their products, so when engaging with consumers they should not have to fall back on hard-sell tactics. With the density of networks, the hard sell will become more and more intrusive. Brands should become friends with their consumers, a friend that listens as well as informs. This would allow brands to develop and change their advertising strategy to enhance the lives of their customers while guiding product development. The age of big data allows brands to become even more powerful and most people would agree such power should not be abused. However I would suggest that to abuse this new power would be of no long term benefit. Brands would benefit far more if they engaged cooperatively purely because cooperation has been evolutionarily shown to be the best tactic for survival.
Evolution may not be popular with people who have an investment in an established belief, but as Dawkins writes, 'The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all descent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored' (R. Dawkins, 2008: 94). This fact disturbed Darwin greatly but he also realised that it is an unavoidable part of natural selection. Dawkins suggests that when we look at animals like cheetahs and gazelles they seem to be amazingly well designed. Cheetahs are perfectly adapted for catching gazelles and gazelles are perfectly adapted for escaping from cheetahs. We must understand that they are the outcome of an evolutionary arms race in which millions of animals have perished. The development of all animals has come about through millions of unsuccessful animals being caught while the successful ones make it through to reproduce and pass on the genes that helped them survive. The sheer number of deaths that lie behind the development of creatures is horrifying yet at the same time it has a kind of savage beauty.
We must not forget however that animals spend vast amounts of time and energy working cooperatively, providing food and support for family and other members of the group. Natural selection is a stabilising pressure that is harsh, but works in favour of tactically moderated cooperative behaviour. We cooperate because it is a successful survival strategy, allowing us to benefit as part of a group. Our instinct to be selfish is balanced by an instinct that realises selfish behaviour can also do us harm in groups. We have domesticated ourselves; we have imitated others in the group over the course of generations until it has become an inherited trait. As a culture we work together in businesses or on projects. The team members that succeed do so because they cooperate. This is not blind obedience; there is a sting in the tail. Cooperation is reciprocal, not given freely, and people or companies that do not comply with this social contract suffer the consequences of the shadow of the future. Behavioural ecology is reciprocity with a gloved fist; our future is always predicated upon the habits of the past. As Steven Strogatz says, 'we see this version of morality around the world, be upright and forgiving, but retaliatory. That is Old Testament, it's not, turn the other cheek, it's an eye for an eye, but not ten eyes for an eye' (2010). To misunderstand or remain ignorant of the deep and intrinsic complexities of both malevolent and cooperative models of evolutionary selection is to grossly misunderstand the world in which we all live. It does not matter if we agree with this opinion or not. Our opinions make no difference to the process of evolution. Cooperation was not constructed by our teachers or by god. It was handed down to us by our biology. I personally like that idea and believe it will continue to influence the evolution of humanity.