Tappers and listeners = marketers and respondents

One of my favorite books in recent years has been Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which masterfully covers “why some ideas survive and others die”.

There’s a wonderful anecdote in the book about “Tappers and Listeners”, from which I’ll quote the first several paragraphs:

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The StarSpangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there’s a good “listener” candidate nearby.)

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself — tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless: How could you be so stupid?

This is the perfect metaphor for the problem of “message mismatch” in search marketing — when a Long Tail of thousands of keywords crashes into a Short Tail of just a few landing pages or deep links.

The marketer, when coming up with those thousands of keywords to bid on, automatically makes the leap between the keyword phrase and its relationship to to the generic page that they’re directing those clicks to. He or she hears the “song” of why it’s contextually relevant in his or her own head.

The actual respondent, however, doesn’t have that soundtrack playing. In fact, they might have an entirely different song in mind when they type in that keyword phrase.

If you aren’t explicitly connecting the dots with highly targeted landing pages, odds are you’re leaving a lot of unconverted respondents with a bunch of disconnected taps.