Ethan Decker on Brand Science & Symbols

AI summary. In this conversation, part of a series of conversations by Peter Spear, Ethan Decker shares his unique background and how it has shaped his approach to brand science. He introduces key concepts, such as the "banana curve" of buyer distribution and the importance of signaling theory in branding. Ethan emphasizes the limitations of synthetic research and the critical role of qualitative research in understanding consumer behavior. The conversation offers insights into Ethan's perspective on branding and marketing, influenced by his multidisciplinary experience.

Ethan is the Founder and President of Applied Brand Science. He is a brand strategist and marketing expert who has spent 20 years doing award-winning brand strategy, advertising, and market research for some of the world’s biggest brands. Prior to launching his own company, he was Planning Director at 72andSunny and a Group Strategy Director at Crispin Porter Bogusky. Check out his TED Talk “We’re All in Marketing: What Evolution Tells us About Advertising”

I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their stories and it's a beautiful question. I always over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want.

And, the question is, where do you come from?

Where do I come from? I come from two streams that merged. One being a waspy New England Protestant white community, and a Russian Jewish lineage that in many ways is still fleeing from the pogroms of their soul. Pogroms? I'm not sure how to pronounce that.

And where did this, where did you grow up? Where did these streams cross?

Philadelphia. I grew up downtown, Center City, Philadelphia, so being in big cities is my resonant frequency. I hum and vibrate in those spaces. And left Philly for Maine a little bit, that's where I fell in love with the outdoors. And then went to Ohio for college and New Mexico for grad school and now I'm in Boulder.

Did you have an idea growing up in Philly, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, and it hasn't happened that way.

What was it? Will you share?

I thought I would end up on Broadway. Really? Yeah. My mother is very talented and had a professional career and I inherited some of her talent, but then did not pursue it. And she did not push me into it either, which was interesting as well. So I did not become a Broadway person that could have been on stage or behind the stage. I did write musicals for a little while.

And did you perform?

I did. I performed as well.

What was that like?

Fun. I love it. I step on a stage and I feel at home. It's the opposite of the people who have massive crippling stage fright. For me getting on stage is, ah, all right, let's do this.

I was looking at your LinkedIn, and you went from Oberlin studying sociology, to Santa Fe to study complexity and urban ecology. What's the thread?

It's more of a web than a thread. I have a brain that happens to be pretty good at a lot of different things. Some of my friends used to be annoyed like, oh, God, of course, you're good at this, Ethan, and I have very many natural limits. So they were wrong in many ways. But it meant that I had a proclivity for science and I was okay at it. And then I had proclivity for creativity and writing and music. And I was okay at that too. So I ended up bouncing around. The undergraduate work in sociology was my attempt to understand culture and identity and how humans interact and how societies form. And then I hit a limit there of objectivity or pseudo subjectivity. I don't know really what to call it anymore. But, the postmodern analysis of things. Which is to say there's no one way to read a book, you can read it however you interpret it, and culture and context matter for how you read and interpret things, let's say. The postmodern analysis of biology left me wanting. And I said, I think there's an actual there there, I think there's something we can say for sure, DNA is DNA is DNA. And your interpretation of DNA is not as relevant. That there's an objective truth. And the place it really showed up the most was for things like gender. And I'm sure you can appreciate this being, I think, a fellow Gen Xer, gender, like the current craze about gender, they're standing on our shoulders. Of course, we were the ones to say, we have to bust gender norms. And Boy George, God bless ya, we did bust a lot of gender norms, but it also meant that there were some things that I was dissatisfied with when it came to understanding gender, because I think that there is biology, there is objective truth as well. And after having so many interpretations of identity and humanity and things like gender, I wanted to study something hard, hard science. Let's say, because actually the social sciences are indeed the hard sciences. They're the hardest sciences. Physics and chemistry. They're hard sciences. Sociology, psychology. They're the hardest sciences. So goddamn hard to do them. So getting to an exciting, but slightly frustrating point with understanding people and sociology and minds and identity. I said, let me go back to something more objective and concrete and hard science and environmental science was my other draw. So I got a PhD in ecology and I studied fractal ecosystems and complex systems theory, and I did quantitative modeling. So that was fun. And then I hit my limit on that. And I said, okay, I will only ever be restaurant conversational level of math. And I think to really excel in this world, I need to be fluent in math and probability theory. And I was never going to be fluent in probability theory or even coding, even though I wasn't a bad coder.

And you were in New Mexico.

That was New Mexico. I did grad school and the study of complex systems in New Mexico.

And that must serve you well now, or not?

It does. It actually does. It helps. In a couple of big ways, and I assume you mean the complex thing, not New Mexico. But New Mexico is helping.

Sure, New Mexico was good for you too, but the complexity science.

Yeah, the complexity science has helped because markets, marketing, advertising, these are inherently, technically speaking, complex systems. Which means there are feedback loops. There are deep interconnected webs. There's non linear responses to things. A small thing like having a trans kid get a customized beer can blow up to two billion dollars in lost revenue for the company, the country's largest beer maker. And then there are levels. There are different levels of understanding. The personal level, the group level, the cultural level, the societal level, and those are hallmarks of complex systems. So understanding that does help me understand a bit of how to approach it and how to analyze it in a way that a lot of classically trained marketers just won't see it the same way.

When did you first bump into marketing as a way of work, like something to do with your time?

I fell ass backwards into it. I left academia to become an editor of an outdoor magazine with an old buddy. I ran that for a couple years and I ran it right into the ground.

What is the role of research to help a marketer in that shift towards developing a new intuition about how to grow?

I start by saying data is data is data. And there's just comes in different flavors and qualities. And just because data is big and quantitative doesn't necessarily make it good or useful or insightful. And just because data is small or hard to quantify doesn't make it meaningless and unhelpful. So that's my first foray, usually, into the world of research and information, is trying to break down people's assumptions and biases when it comes to what kind of data they prioritize. Research, I think, is critical because it helps you understand the world you're operating in. You need to know the environment, you need to understand your market, you need to understand your shopper, and you don't get that without doing some kind of research.

You used the word intuition in a very intentional way, it seemed to me. What do you mean when you say intuition and you're working with a client?

Here's a good example. You've probably heard a client say, we need to educate our consumer about blah diddy blah diddy blah. And that always is the big flag for me. Ding! It's going up. That says, this person has a certain intuition about how people shop and buy and think about brands and how they relate to my brand. So I need to work on that intuition, that intuitive understanding, because you're not going to educate anybody. I hate to say, no one gets educated from outside. I've never been educated on how to use olive oil, or I've never been educated on low sodium anything, or on selvedge denim. No one's educated me, and therefore made me want to buy their stuff. And so the intuition is wrong about the relationship between the buyer and the brand.

So if you look at the science of consumer psychology, the brand science, one of the fundamental laws is that we are mental misers. We think as little as possible about the least amount we can, because we've got more important s**t we got to think about. Our doctor's appointments, our kids doctor's appointments, our mom's medication, where the hell my car keys are, my next five meetings, the 200 emails I haven't done, planning for my next vacation, all of those things, that's taking up the space in our brains as it should. You know what's not? Whether my bleach is made in America. Or whether it has a ESG corporate social program. So my bleach isn't going to educate me on s**t. And so if a marketer mentions, we got to educate our consumer about the quality of our bleach or something. Then I realized their intuition is off about how to connect with shoppers.

And then if they understand something like how much we are mental misers, and that means we're trying to think less about bleach. And when we have a hard question about bleach, like, is this eco friendly? Cause I thought all bleach was inherently not eco friendly. We substitute that with an easy question. Like what does Peter buy? Cause Peter's an eco nut. So I'll just do whatever Peter says. And that's how we think. So then that marketer with a retrained intuition, instead of saying we need to educate them on our eco friendliness of our bleach would say, huh, what are the shortcuts we can give them so that they know our bleach is eco friendly or feel our bleach is eco friendly? It's a really different approach.

I feel like marketing science can have a behaviorist streak in it that says we're all creatures of habit, mental misers, as you say. And what this does is make brand kind of meaningless. Or makes it just an empty mnemonic device, or distinctive asset. So granting any significance to brand is irrelevant. Is that how you feel?

That's one of the elements and that's one of the laws. If one of the laws is we're mental misers, we're trying to think less. And so brands function in a certain way, given that law, but there's another law that is extremely pertinent and relevant to brands, which seems to be a counterpoint or an opposite of that, which is that we are symbolic creatures. We signal to each other. So I studied evolutionary biology and organisms of all flavors and all stripes, whether they walk or quack or swim, organisms are constantly signaling to each other all kinds of information. The 1st type of signaling is, am I a threat? Will I kill you or eat you? Am I poisonous? Do I have spikes and thorns? That kind of stuff. And then critically, we also very much signal to each other about being a good mate or being a good community member. So the peacock feathers, the classic one, although I like the peacock spider better. Little tiny peacock spiders.

For those that don't have video, Ethan did a wonderful impersonation of the peacock.

Oh, you can watch it on my TED Talk. I do.

Oh, it's a bit you do?

Yeah. I do a peacock spider dance. Peacock spiders, they have these beautiful carapaces that are multicolored and iridescent. And when they're mating, the males flip up their back flap, and it looks like a peacock tail. And then out of their eight little legs, they flip up a couple of their legs, and they do a little dance. They dance back and forth. It's like they're shaking maracas to impress the females and those are all symbols to impress the female to mate with them.

And as humans, we cue in on symbols all the time. Number one, people's hair. Oh my God. We are obsessed with hair, aren't we? But then clothes. And the kind of car you drive. And nowadays with Zoom, what's in your backdrop. We're very, very sensitive to all these symbols and signals. So technically it's called signaling theory. How do we signal certain things to each other to show that we're a member of the group or that we're cool or that we're trendy or whatever? Brands play a huge role in how we signal to each other. If you've ever seen a fad like Ugg boots or Hunter boots or of course Crocs are back now.

What about the Stanley tumbler?

Stanley tumblers. BAM! Great example. Those kind of trends and fads are some of the best examples of how we use brands to signal to each other. Stanley is no better or worse, I would say, than two or three other brands just like it that are built for tough. But you need to have the Stanley, and even better yet, you need to have one of the limited edition Stanley colors. To signal to your friends that you're cool and hip and that kind of stuff. So this seems opposite of what I just said about brands are shorthand and you think less. But in a way they connect because the Stanley cup, the Stanley brand, is shorthand for me signaling to my friends that I'm hip and that I have a certain level of status and I'm in the club.

Yeah, that's I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard it articulated like that. So the tension between, because I hear the behaviorist thing and it feels like it really is just an erasure of the significance.

So you've got signal theory on one side and then on the other side, it's just brands as a heuristic, a shortcut, a heuristic brand is a heuristic to make a choice easier and faster and simpler. I'm just going to buy the same olive oil I always buy. It's a safe bet. Whereas on the flip side, I have to very carefully choose the brand of jeans I wear because I wanted to symbolize and signal something particular to the people in my life.

And what's the role of a marketer to make a brand a potent signal? How do you help them do that?

Well, if you want to make the brand a potent symbol or effective signal, whatever a signal that grows, you need to play in the realm of signaling. And who cares more about signals and which people care about which signals. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't care or who choose very actively to signal other things. Like a great example is if you're the head of Morgan Stanley, this also comes from my TED Talk. This is not an ad for my TED Talk.

I'll include a link to your TED Talk, Ethan. (Here it is)

If you're the head of Goldman Sachs, what do you wear? A custom Armani suit with a beautiful Italian tie and you wear the most expensive Rolex you can buy. If you wore that onto the campus of the University of Iowa, into the biology department to talk about ant biology, you'd be laughed at because everyone would say you're superficial. And why are you flashing all this expensive bling and you clearly don't care about scholarship. So if you're the world's preeminent ant biologist, like E.O. Wilson was, you wear a suit from the 80s because it still fits. And you wear a tie that has a couple stains but nobody really notices because it still matches your suit well enough. And you wear a Swiss Army watch because it's very practical and all watches tell time equally well. So there's no point in spending more on a Rolex. And then you go into your lab and you are lauded, and you are respected because the vestments you're wearing signal that you care about scholarship more than you care about clothing. And so both of those people are wearing clothes that signal the right things in their environments. So, if you want to be successful and build a strong brand, you need to understand the signals that your brand gives off or supports in the environments where you want it to be bought.

We're near the end of time, but I was invited to answer a couple of questions. The role of qualitative in the age of what is now, I think we're just agreeing is called synthetic research. Do you have any encounters or experiences with either synthetic research or thoughts about the impact of LLMs and generative AI on how your marketer develops an intuition?

I think synthetic research is a crappy first step, let's call it. It's good at giving you a bland, basic summary of things, but I would never rely on synthetic research or LLMs to really understand the state of things, or the nuances, or importantly, the less common things that are bubbling up. And that's, I think, where a lot of qualitative is so vital. It's not getting the average what do people want out of jackets? They want them to be warm, to be waterproof sometimes, tolook good. Puffy jackets are popular. Like, no s**t. An LLM can tell you that. An LLM will tell you the middle. Yeah, and it will summarize it in a nice bland way. Beige. It'll give you beige. If you want to understand where things are going or the nuances or the potent meanings under there, you definitely have to go beyond LLMs.

And the other critical reason is when we get back to the signaling stuff. And even the other stuff about some of the laws of mental misers and how we make decisions. A lot of the real reasons are not even available to us. We don't even know why we do what we do. You ask someone why they buy the clothes they do and they say, oh, because it makes me feel like an individual and it expresses myself and I like blah, blah, blah. When in fact, that's 180 degrees from the truth. It makes them feel like they fit in. Yeah. It's acceptable to their group. Or it's lauded by their group.  

And that's why they choose the brand, not because it's unique or makes them feel individual. So you don't get that from LLMs. And I do think you probably don't even get that from quant surveys. Like there's not a single quant survey. I think if you had five years ago, polled people in general who drinks sparkling water and said, what are the aspects you look for in a sparkling water brand? And you'd, of course, you'd have to populate it with a refreshing, easy to buy, comes in different flavors, good price, available everywhere I want to go. You wouldn't have ever said also has a crazy death metal style brand and makes kooky marketing that makes me feel like a punk teenage boy. You never would have gotten that from a quant survey. You never would have gotten it from an LLM. And yet by going out and doing real qualitative listening and understanding an audience you would have realized there are a whole bunch of action sports dude bros who would never buy Evian or Fiji because they're sponsored by Monster. That's why you now have Liquid Death as an 800 million dollar brand of bubbly water.

I hadn't heard that story. Is that the sort of the origin story of Liquid Death?

You know what, yeah, I think even before the founder threw up a fake little website to gauge interest, he did that because his intuition from talking to humans. Yes. Hanging out at X Game type things. Hanging out at the skate park. Hanging out where people were shredding on snowboards on rails and skates and BMX and stuff. These were folks who were sponsored head to toe by energy drinks. And they had gotten to a point where they didn't want to poison their body with all that s**t. So they would take their Red Bull and Monster and fill it with water. They couldn't walk around with a Fiji because a) Fiji wasn't sponsoring anybody and b) it looked stupid if you're a dude bro. Yeah, I used the term affectionately. They wanted something fun and tough and whatever. And that's when the guy who created it said wow. There is no brand of water for the sports culture. Holy s**t. He didn't want to just go pure branding. It's the same product. He made sure it's real Austrian sparkling water. So great. But mostly 99 percent of the play was that dripping skull logo and a brand called Liquid Death in that old Germanic black letter.

It's amazing.

It's amazing. Doesn't come from quant, doesn't come from big data, doesn't come from LLMs. Amazing.

All right. Listen, I want to thank you so much. I hope it was painless for you.

You're welcome. There was that moment in the middle.

I know. I felt that too.

Where my ego got bruised a little bit.

Oh, really?

I'm joking. I'm just kidding.

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