After watching Fox’s pilot for their new show, Lie to Me, the other night, I did a little research to find out whether or not it’s actually possible to tell whether or not someone’s lying just by looking at their face. Long story short? Yes, it is.

Decades ago, a man by the name of Paul Ekman began his work on exploring the infinite facets of human emotion and expression. Many years later, the Facial Action Coding System, a five-hundred page look at the tiny variations in facial expression. Today, his research has been employed by everyone from those in medical professions to computer animators at the desks of Pixar to better understand or emulate the authentic language of human expression.

While Lie to Me is a work of fiction, its premise is very much rooted in truth. A person skilled in FACS recognition may, indeed, be able to accurately deduce the truth and lies that are written on the faces of anyone from any culture at any time. 

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that and I’m not fluent enough in medical and psychological speak to give you a good lowdown in something as complex as human expression. Malcolm Gladwell, however, is. If you’re interested in learning a little more about the powers of human expression, here’s a link to an old article of his about this very subject. It’s well worth the read.

Everyone does it. You do it, I do it, and all of the people that you meet, know, and interact with every day do it. We cling to little words and phrases, cadence and pronunciation, that differentiate the ways that we talk from those around us. I’m not a linguist and I haven’t explored this phenomenon in great detail, but I do know that a significant portion of the reasoning behind these natural differences stems from the individual, familial, and cultural backgrounds that each of us have.

People from a particular place or region may speak the same dialect; but, dialect isn’t what we’re talking about here. We’re just talking about subtle repetition of certain phrases or words that seem to congregate through certain people or groups of people. (It’s like dialect, but on a smaller scale. It’s possible, for example, for this particular phenomenon to exist between a family, a town, or simply an individual.)

In and of itself, this phenomenon is interesting but not immediately important to the worlds of design and marketing. If, however, you can develop a way to discover and target your message or product to these specific groups of individuals in a language that sounds, feels, and breathes like their own, you may be able to establish an unconscious link between your product and your customers.

All the demographic research in the world won’t help you reach a customer if he or she can’t relate (on several levels) to where you’re coming from. Especially in an age in which advertising is literally injected into every minute of every day, it’s harder than ever to get someone to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.

But, by finding a way to make your idea, product, organization, or service sound and feel as though it’s part of your customers world, in effect it is. And, if it is, you’ve just won half of the battle.

After finishing Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent masterpiece, Outliers, which details success in relation to culture and opportunity, I decided to explore a small opportune phenomenon of my own. When I was a child, I attended Montessori school at the wishes of my parents. Essentially, the idea behind these schools is to expose children to new ideas and individual learning experiences from an early age to create well-rounded individuals with a unique desire to learn. While I didn’t know it at the time, my days at Montessori were beginning to shape the way in which I interact with and view the world even today.

Today, I’ve developed a case of serial entrepreneurship. I can’t stop starting things. I always try to see them through but, if one idea fails, I’ve got another three lined up to take its place. Given my own experiences with the benefits of Montessori, I decided to do some research to discover whether or not this effect was noticeable in other Montessori graduates and, sure enough, it is.

Bill Clinton, Yo Yo Ma, Larry Page & Sergey Brin (the founders of Google), and others are among the many successful graduates of the Montessori method. Of course, it would be a bit far fetched to say that the schools caused these people to become who they are today. But, it would also be a little bit off the map to say that the schools had nothing to do with it. I suspect that if Gladwell were to take a look at it, he would agree that, indeed, the exposure of children to new ideas and strong individualism at such an early age creates a foundation that allows people to succeed when presented with the opportunities that help them excel.

His book, Outliers, is a fascinating exploration into the factors that underlay success. In a book a little thicker than your thumb, he delves into the questions of why Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, how professional hockey players become the best, and why Asians seem to be so talented with the world of numbers. It’s well worth the read if you’ve got a few minutes to spare.

Everything is worth something. Economics thrives on that notion and very proudly works to weigh the opportunity costs of this, that, and the other to determine the utility of an item, action, or desire. The idea, of course, is that you can calculate the value of one thing in relation to other things that could be sought after or attained for the same amount of effort. Or can you?

A $90 shirt is a terrible economic decision any way that you look at it. With $90, you could easily fill the back of your car with shirts from Target or Wal-Mart. What economists fail to weigh in to the equation, however, is the value of happiness. By nature, emotions cannot be evaluated in the same way that costs can. Humans are notoriously awful at evaluating the value of emotions and, more often than not, fail to grasp the power that they carry.

While a $90 t-shirt opposes most theories of opportunity cost, it may indeed turn out to be the best possible decision for its buyer because it makes him or her happier than a more economical alternative from Target. In the same vein, a t-shirt from Target or Wal-Mart may even take away the happiness of an individual that was hoping for something more. In both cases, the opportunity cost forgone in purchasing the $90 t-shirt is significantly altered by the power of emotion.

I’m not a fan of economics, though I do see its uses (sometimes). Still, like most theories, it has its flaws. In marketing, the problem with pure opportunity cost is that most people don’t think that way. How many people do you know that pull out a calculator at the store and determine how many bottles of Coca-Cola they could buy for the price of a video game? Very few people make purchasing decisions based on how many pairs of underwear they could have bought instead of a movie. It just doesn’t happen.

So in marketing a product, think about what will make people happy. Price is important, but it’s not that important. If you know the people you’re trying to reach and you give them something that will make them happy, they’ll happily pay for it - whatever it is. This is why people buy Ferraris, stay at the Ritz, eat at Emeril’s, and spend $65,000 on a bed from Sweden; there’s nothing wrong with that. If it makes you happy and you’ve got the wallet for it, give it a go.

YouTube isn’t what it used to be (but that’s a good thing). Gone are the days of only sitting at home or in an office and clicking on links sent from friends, family, and coworkers to watch sneezing pandas, skateboarding puppies, and people hurting themselves in ways we’d never thought possible. YouTube has become a group activity - something that you do when you’re in a room full of people and a web browser is open. Everyone gathers around the tiny glowing screen to watch the videos that they’ve all seen before in a very different way. What’s more, each and every person in the room brings to the table a whole suite of different videos that they have on their internalized favorites list in hopes of winning over the crowd. Sometimes they’re funny; sometimes they’re not. The group, of course, reacts accordingly and the person in charge of the keyboard can quickly be praised or booted for his or her choice in videos.

Most sites can’t do this. Even with my love for Foozoo, I know the marketers and designers and psychologists of the world aren’t gathered en masse to read it. Sure, they’re free to send an article to a friend or coworker, but the experience isn’t quite the same.

Bloggers can’t yet compete with the power of a large woman falling on a table; they can’t deliver that same, strange effect that brings groups of people together in front of a screen to watch, smile, and laugh at a short clip on YouTube. Sure, we can write things that make people think and that make people talk. But, at least so far, we haven’t been able to recreate the intrinsic quality of YouTube that brings large groups of people physically together in one room to search out our best posts and choose visiting our blogs over eating out, catching a movie, or hitting the mall.

Blog reading is still a very personal activity and, perhaps, it has to be (at least in its current form). It’s hard to imagine getting together a group of friends to read a blog in favor of surfing the wonderful world of YouTube. Still, if we can find a way to simulate the YouTube effect in the sphere of blogging, think of the new potential that would follow along with it. Blogs, like YouTube, could harness the power of the human group dynamic. When people interact with both things and each other, the experience is quite different than if they were to interact with them alone. If we can find a way to bring people together (physically) through the power of words, just imagine the whole new world of the web that we could create.

Now, more than ever, people from all over the world are within reach of one another. Someone in Sweden can just as easily be chatting with a friend in Japan and that friend in Japan may just be dating someone that lives in Brazil. Distance is no longer a factor when it comes to communications in today’s world. Thanks to the internet, you can quite easily be in two-hundred places at once - all at the touch of a button.

Unlike ever before, today’s generation has grown up as part of an online web that connects people beyond the boundaries of race, nationality, politics, or religion. We live in a world that’s more open-minded than ever before and it’s only destined to drive farther in that direction as the gaps between places grow ever smaller thanks to multi-lingual social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Of course, it goes without saying that there are still a number of boundaries between a New York stockbroker and a woman living in India; the two couldn’t be more different and yet both are just as likely to have some connection to the massive stretch of virtual real-estate known as the internet.

Today’s tomorrow is a lot different than it would have been twenty years ago. Tomorrow’s leaders will share an understanding of humanity beyond anything in existence today; with tomorrow’s followers building further on that same understanding as the world becomes seemingly smaller each day.

In terms of marketing, all of these facts couldn’t be more true. Coca-Cola is nearly as ubiquitous in India and China as it is in the United States; in fact, in some places, it may be even more so. The internet’s ability to breach the gaps between locations has paved the way for a world that is interconnected in ways that even the smartest minds had never thought possible.

Amazingly, despite the growth of the internet to eclipse most of the world, marketing has become even more specific than ever. Nearly gone are the days of the “mass-market.” Companies and organizations alike are learning to cater to an infinite number of niches - each with their own set of rules, wants, likes, and beliefs.

The internet’s catalytic affect on the world has just now started to reveal itself, with new effects popping up minute-by-minute in the online world that never sleeps. Just as a business man signs off in New York, another in Beijing is beginning his day amongst the billions of others connected from their pockets, their desks, their homes, and their offices.

Why What’s Inside Is What’s Outside

If you’re like me, you probably have a fridge full of all sorts of random things with a number of supposed health benefits. POM Tea, Silk Milk, Red Bull; the list is virtually endless. Of course, I know that deep down, the actual effects of these beverages are sketchy at best. But, nevertheless, I continue to buy them because of the way they make me feel.

No doubt you’ve done this at least once. You walk into the store, pick up everything that you need, and head for the last item on your list when suddenly you see it: some smoothie, some juice, some vitamin-infused water that you’ve either read about or heard about in some obscure article (much like this one). “Hmm…” you think to yourself. “I suppose that I could try it. $1.99 isn’t too bad if it keeps me healthy. It sure beats a visit to the doctor.” You end up walking out with a smile on your face and $2 less in your wallet.

A day or so later, you walk to the fridge and crack open your new beverage. To no one’s surprise, you’ll face one of two results: it’s the absolute worst thing you’ve ever tasted or it is, in your opinion, the most incredible thing you’ve ever tasted. The former usually occurs when the drink is actually healthy. The latter is often the result of things that have been added for flavor that almost definitely compromise the actual health benefits, but nevertheless, taste very good indeed.

Your next trip to the grocery leaves you with a bottle of water from a small country that the world has just recognized to exist, Red Bull, and a six-pack of Vitamin Water. Your wallet is now roughly $20 lighter than when you walked through the door. Interestingly enough, all of the above beverages are physically equivalent to much cheaper (and less healthy) counterparts. What’s surprising is that, statistically, they may in fact set themselves apart because of the way that they make your feel.

When you look at the bottle, carton, label, or glass several words stand out in your mind. These words can be any combination of the following and are likely the result of a clever marketing team that knows just how to balance the negative qualities of a beverage with the positive ones that were added later with the sole purpose of the bottle in mind. Vitamin X, Herbalerba, Poozie Root, Antioxidific; I could probably sit here all day making up words. And so could they.

The truth of the matter is that all of these health additives probably shouldn’t make you smarter, more focused, healthier, or lighter…until your brain kicks in. In their book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, authors Ori and Rom Brafman discuss this very effect in relation to SoBe Adrenaline Rush. In the experiment described in the book, a group of economists tested several groups of students to determine the effects of the drink on the students’ test scores. One group took the test without receiving any of the drink to be tested, the second group received a can of SoBe at a cost of $2.89, and a third group received a can of SoBe after being informed that they were receiving a discount and their beverages would cost them $.89. The second and third groups received an identical parade of information highlighting the supposed health benefits and effects of the drink and watched a short film while the beverages supposedly took effect. So what happened? The students that paid more for the drink scored quite a bit higher on their tests than those who paid less for it. The economists’ conclusion showcases the effect, described as physical and mental effects artificially created by value attribution to SoBe, and realizes that “expectations change the reality we live in” (1).  

Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface of this phenomenon by summarizing their ideas. But, if you’re interested, I’d highly recommend Sway. It’s an incredibly interesting look at the science that separates perception and reality, an ever more important notion within the world of marketing.

(1) Sway: The Irrestible Pull of Irrational Behavior. Brafman, Ori & Brafman, Rom. 2008. P. 56.