Category Archives: History

Improper Design of Experiment: How 1970s Sexism Almost Killed the Computer Revolution

Posted by Nathan on

Sexism in Experiment Design

All the marketing research technologies in the world cannot overcome the disadvantages of poor research planning.

As marketers we get excited about the potential of advanced tools like neuromarketing and predictive analytics but they are rendered worthless when coupled with a poor design of experiment. The design of experiment (or DOE) helps us to structure our research questions to maximize the relevance of the results. In short: are we asking the right question and are we asking the right people? If the answer to either is no, then it really doesn’t matter what confidence level our research returns; the results are pointed in the wrong direction. As a statistics mentor of mine once said, significance without relevance is simply a way to go wrong with confidence.

In the 1970s, one company’s research team had struck gold in the fledgling personal computer industry. They had a phenomenal product and they were asking the right question. But, arguably due to a sexist view of a woman’s role in the workplace of the future, they asked the wrong people. They failed in design of experiment.

Birth of the Personal Computer Age

The personal computer, the mouse, email, word processing, the first paint program, the Ethernet and the laser printer were all created and introduced by one company in 1977. That company was Xerox. But a marketing blunder fueled in part by 1970s sexism sent each of these products out to be development by other companies.

In 1969, at Rochester, NY-based Xerox Corporation, CEO Peter McColough and his chief scientist Jacob Goldman had the foresight to steer the world’s leading copier maker directly into the computer age. They purchased a computer company in Palo Alto, CA and created a pure research facility filled with high tech equipment, bean bags, sodas and some of the brightest minds in the still young computer industry. The facility would become known as Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, and it would develop for Xerox a modern personal computing paradise. And it would be lost.

A Stellar Nursery

When McColough and Goldman developed PARC they did everything right. They picked the right people, they made available the right resources and they gave it an almost unlimited budget for research and development. Its staff list was a veritable Who’s Who of the computing world: George Pake, Robert Taylor, Butler Lampson, Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Lynn Conway and many others.

Their directive was simple: Use your imagination and skills to determine where this company needs to go with computers. And that they did. Within seven years they had developed—or perfected—all the components of the modern personal computer. They had created for their Xerox bosses a desktop computer called the Alto featuring the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) display. The software package included the first word processing program. It could send email to other computers via the Ethernet, a new network protocol they developed just for that purpose. Documents could be printed out on a lightning-fast laser-driven printer. And the system could be controlled by a revolutionary pointing device they called a mouse.

Excitedly, they prepared to present their new system to the Xerox bosses.

Paradise Lost

The PARC team spent weeks preparing for their executive presentation. Believing that a live demonstration would make the most impact, they got several of the Xerox secretaries to help them train a handful of the executives for a live show. It was the 70s, and female secretaries did most of the real office work—typing, filing, communicating and scheduling. Who better to help train the male executives?

On November 10, 1977, the revolutionary system was presented to the Xerox brass at an aptly named event called Futures Day during a conference in Boca Raton, FL. The top executives watched as some of their counterparts took the stage, writing documents, sending messages back and forth to connected computers, controlling software with the space age pointing device and printing at the speed of light. But the dramatically staged presentation closed to the sound of crickets.

The executives were largely underwhelmed. Most of them were former copier salesmen who were used to rating their business success on the volume of a copier’s clicks—the copy counter, the currency of the old Xerox world that told the company how successful the machine was. The executives looked on this new hardware the way a 15th century sail maker might stare confusedly at a jet engine. They could not understand how to make use of this new world of digital connectivity and productivity.

But the people who could understand it were the executives’ wives. In that 1970s world of Xerox the salesmen’s wives were mostly former secretaries, the backbone of the office, the job description that included the tasks of typing, filing, scheduling, communications and planning that kept the office running, the very tasks this new system was designed to revolutionize. While the executives largely avoided the elaborate demonstration suites the engineers had set up to entertain post-demonstration interest, their wives flocked to it. They wanted to see the machine, the software, the new pointing device, and the laser printer. Their praise was effusive and on point. They knew this would be big stuff.

But, Xerox being a corporation of the era, listened to the silence of its executives. While top management hesitated, wondering what to do next with all this stuff, its architects quietly left to work for—or, in a few cases, found—such companies as Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Adobe Systems. The revolution would take place elsewhere.

The Responsibility of Marketers

The failure of Xerox to exploit the fruits of PARC’s labor can’t be blamed entirely on myopic sexism; given the era, there surely were many companies with the same malady. What seems to have been missing was a voice of reason that could have helped top management and the engineers overcome their prejudices and direct their critical questions to the people who would best know the product’s potential.

As marketers, we are very rarely the innovators in our companies. But we generally are the best communicators, and we often understand better than most the complexity in the relationship between our products and our stakeholders. We have a responsibility to the innovators on our teams to help them understand the markets they are focused on, to see through the prejudices in the market place and to properly define the battle spaces where future revolutions will be taking place.

Helping talented engineers solve the right problem is a small part to play in a revolution. But it is no less critical.

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Further Reading:

The definitive book on the Xerox PARC story is Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: XEROX PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. It is a highly entertaining read with critical lessons for anyone in the fields of engineering or marketing.

A Prehistoric Sales Tool That Still Works

Posted by Nathan on

facial expressions

Originally Published February 2013

One of our most valuable sales tools allows us to establish interpersonal relationships, manage conversations and broadcast our feelings to an attentive world. It was millions of years in the making and we scarcely give it a second thought. It’s our face.

What the Face Can Say

Many successful sales professionals seem to agree that the key to a solid business relationship begins with the establishment of a good personal relationship between the sales person and the decision maker. Trust must be established before product information can be shared and believed.

But how do we know we are building and managing those relationships effectively? What is the feedback mechanism that tells us we’re doing the right things? Good sales people will say they have good instincts or that they are good at reading people. Somehow they just know what their customers are thinking.

What they are likely referring to is an innate ability to observe and understand facial expressions. A skill that was buried deep in our subconscious brain for millions of years and that has been all but adapted out by generations of reliance on spoken language, written language and, as of recently, email and social media.

Prehistoric Origins

Well before the appearance of spoken language, our biological ancestors communicated with each other through body posture and facial expressions. Critical emotional states such as fear, anger, happiness and sadness were transmitted to specific muscles groups in the face where they were converted into expressions. Understanding the meaning of these expressions was very important to assessing the level of harmony—or threat—in the surrounding environment. It was a crucial skill that was passed down through generations and, according to leading researchers, is still with us today.

Dr. Paul Ekman is regarded as the world’s leading authority on facial expressions and their associated emotions. He has spent his entire career traveling the continents and comparing the way different cultures display and decode facial expressions. What he has found is that facial expressions are almost universal in nature and meaning. An expression of disgust on a face in London is readily recognizable to an observer from New Guinea (researchers and ethologists have theorized that this supports the evolutionary origin of expressions as a primal means of communicating within the species).

The Physiology of the Face

Our faces are able to display so much information about what’s going on inside us because of the way they are structured. Unlike most areas of the body, the face is innervated by both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. Remembering our high school biology, the somatic system primarily controls motor functions under conscious control, while the autonomic system manages bodily systems without conscious input. This is why we are able to make some deliberate, exaggerated facial expressions in addition to the spontaneous ones that we don’t or, in some cases, can’t control.

The limbic system, an older part of the brain that mediates emotions, affects the autonomic nervous system in response to emotional activity. When we experience strong emotions it is this system that transduces them for display on the face.

Evolution’s Gift to the Sales Team

After millions of years of evolution we have slowly adapted to other forms of communication including speech, writing and email. But still, deep in the recesses of our primal brain, we have maintained the ability to recognize, and be sensitive to, the facial expressions of others.

When we say someone’s face just lit up, we are likely reacting to an expansion of the orbicularis oculi which tightens the skin around the eyes and allows more light to enter the eye sockets, a sign we correctly interpret as an awakening or sudden understanding. We respond to lowering brows and wrinkled corrugators as a sign of anger, and to a tightening of the lip corners as a signal of restraint. We may not be able to note these observations without training, but we are programmed to observe them and react to them.

Ekman and his team have used this research to develop highly specialized facial recognition programs that are used by government agencies and security firms around the world. But we don’t need to be a highly trained expert to make effective use of this information in the sales and marketing world. By studying the faces of those with whom we communicate, and by learning the basics of expression recognition, we can become more aware of how our words are affecting the conversation. Also, like actors, if we can learn to produce subtle, realistic expressions on demand, we might be able to make better conscious management of the conversation by offering our partners important subconscious clues to assure them of the direction the conversation is taking.

Continued research in the field of facial expression recognition may soon give us even better techniques for the industries of sales, security and any capacity where a heightened awareness of emotional disposition would be a benefit. But for now, sales teams have the opportunity to enhance their effectiveness at building relationships by using a tool that has been with us for eons.

If the eyes are the window on the soul, the face is the door.

For further reading:

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage by Paul Ekman (2001). New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.