Feedback Loops – What are They and Why are They Important for Marketing?

By: Becky Lang

I just finished reading Wired’s article Feedback Loops are Changing What People Do, which was one of the many brilliant Wired pieces that make you think “holy crap civilization is about to change and soon our sunglasses will let us see through walls.” I suggest you read it yourself, but I’ll give a short recap before I relate it to marketing.

Imagine if there were a way to receive information about the level of plaque and decay on your teeth on a daily basis. You can bet you’d start brushing more. The problem is, monitoring that type of information is either impossible or takes too much effort. With a feedback loop, that could change. Feedback loops are the simple process of receiving real time information about an ongoing activity that lets you know whether you need to ease up or add more intensity. It started in technology like thermostats and then was adopted by psychologists like Albert Bandura as a way to help people improve their behavior. They’re highly effective, but they’ve been widely unavailable or impossible, until now. As we get better at collecting and organizing information, the technology to stick sensors everywhere is getting dramatically cheaper – thus shoes with built-in accelerometers.

This presents a huge opportunity for brands that want to do more than just shill product. Brands have a lot of information. Regular brands have market research, but any brand related to technology has real-time information that can be easily pumped into feedback loops. On a small level, a brand like AT&T is using them to improve customer experience. My phone texts me gentle reminders regularly when I’ve reached certain levels of my data plan. But what if we could program it to provide personal loops, like a text that tells me I’ve called my mom 80% less frequently than last month? Quirky, but interesting.

A brand that encapsulates this idea is Mint.com. Instead of just collecting data about your finances, it analyzes your information and reflects it back to you in useful ways. Who knew I was spending that much on gas? Better cut down. Of course there are still problems with Mint – it’s not happening in real time, for one. If I had an app that let me know my bank account balance at any given time, you can bet I’d spend less money. But Mint is constantly at least a day behind. The other problem is its tone – instead of being gentle and harmless, it plays on fear as motivator – “ACTION REQUIRED,” “Unusual Spending,” “Fee” – phrases that cry wolf when your unusual spending on housing was nothing more than paying rent.

Whether or not we could articulate what feedback loops are and why they work, this trend of reflecting useful data back to customers was going to grow no matter what.  I’m excited to see what it brings.