MARKETING OUTSIDE THE SKINNER BOX

Jan C. Gabrielson

Remember your Introduction to Psychology class in college? That's where we learned about operant conditioning. B. F. Skinner invented a device that is now known as the Skinner Box. The box is equipped with a bar (not that kind of bar). When the bar is pressed, a piece of food falls down a chute into the box. A rat in a Skinner Box quickly learns that if it presses a bar, food appears in the chute. Each time it presses the bar and food appears, researchers say the behavior of pressing the bar is reinforced. If researchers tweak the mechanism so that the food stops falling when the bar is pressed, the learned behavior is extinguished and the rat stops pressing the bar. What does this mean for marketing?

The things we do to market a law practice may pay off right away, but more often we don't see results for months or even years. If we were rats, the absence of immediate reinforcement would cause us to discontinue our marketing activities if a day or two went by without landing a new client as a direct result of our marketing efforts.

But we aren't rats; we're human. We are able to look ahead and appreciate that the contacts we make now, the relationships we build over time pay off over time. Like rats, we like it better if we make a call, go to a meeting, do a mailing and new clients come in immediately as a result. And we can get discouraged if they don't. But we have to operate on a higher level than rats in a Skinner Box. If two years of building our relationship with a promising prospect finally pays off, that success must reinforce our past and future marketing efforts.

Bottom line: enjoy your successes, keep up your marketing even when you don't see an immediate payoff. Meeting people and earning their trust takes time. Your efforts will pay off eventually.