Parasite, Predator, or Partner?
The same qualities and behaviors that make us either admire, resent, or despise some people make us admire, resent, or despise some brands.
Two weeks ago, after Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) shut off power to millions of California residents, an editorial cartoon expressed the way many of us in the Golden State feel about PG&E, a utility company that is somehow both powerful and lame. Created by Tom Meyer, the cartoon took the form of a lightbulb joke:
Q: How many PG&E employees does it take to turn on a lightbulb?
A: One in the truck bucket. One truck driver. 137 meteorologists. 972 bankruptcy lawyers. 17,050 utility pole inspectors. 16 million shareholders…
The same qualities and behaviors that make us either admire, resent, or despise some people make us admire, resent, or despise some brands.
You don’t have to be a California resident to grasp the gist of the story: The utility can’t do its most basic job because it’s wasting resources paying too many of the wrong people. No wonder customers are outraged!
How brands are like people
I tell this story because it illustrates a much broader phenomenon: as psychological researchers have shown, we view business brands as if they were people, and the same qualities and behaviors that make us either admire, resent, or despise some people make us admire, resent, or despise some brands. Two of the researchers, marketing expert Chris Malone and social psychologist Susan Fiske, wrote an accessible book, THE HUMAN BRAND, that applies this insight in practical ways, aiming to show what businesses can do to elicit admiration and earn loyalty.
In the case of PG&E, the consumer sentiment at the time of the outages seems to be somewhere between resentment and contempt. I haven’t done a survey of people’s attitudes toward PG&E, so I say this from a general understanding of the sorts of behaviors that elicit these emotions. PG&E is a monopoly, and like many monopolies it gets away with what a business in a competitive marketplace simply can’t do. As consumers, we hate that, but there’s just little we can do about it, which makes us resent the powerful monopolist even more. If we also believe the powerful monopolist is incompetent (not just powerful and selfish), then resentment turns to full-blown contempt: we don’t just resent the business, we despise it.
The more general framework is based on the idea—also grounded in abundant research—that we form impressions of others based on two dimensions: warmth (whether the person or company has good intentions toward us) and competence (whether they are able to deliver on those intentions). The two dimensions yield a two-by-two matrix (as shown below), where someone can be high on one or both of the dimensions. This is an inherently interesting observation—but it also yields useful predictions about feelings, and about the actions that those feelings trigger.
The four quadrants
In my own book, THE MIDDLEMAN ECONOMY, I apply the same psychological framework to different kinds of middlemen, thus explaining why we have often have negative or ambivalent attitudes toward these people and companies.
Each quadrant represents a unique combination of warmth (good intentions toward others) and competence (the ability to deliver on those intentions). Each combination creates an emotion (such as contempt or admiration) and each emotion elicits a tendency toward a particular kind of action (such as destruction or loyalty). The animalistic metaphors are in line with the observation that people dehumanize people and brands that they have real antipathy toward.
Let’s look at the four types/quadrants one by one:
The Parasite, a person or business who is low in both warmth and competence, inspires contempt or even disgust, and therefore creates the urge to avoid or even destroy them.
The Predator is competent but bold; unlike the Parasite, which is all bad, the Predator is at least good at what they do! But the Predator is a bully, using their power mainly for their own benefit, capturing an outsize share of any value they create. (When we use metaphors like “shark” to describe certain businesses or individuals, we are responding to our sense that these people are preying on the vulnerable.) Naturally, Predators tend to elicit resentment, and therefore the desire to harm. So it’s not a sustainable path to profit.
The Pet is the most rarely seen type of middleman: warm but incompetent, this type of businessperson or company elicits pity. If you do business with this type, it’s not because you think their services are worth the price, but because you feel sorry for them and wish to help for that reason alone.
The Partner is the best type of the four—the one everyone wants to do business with. That’s because the Partner lands squarely in the "Golden Quadrant," high in both warmth and competence: having good intentions and the ability to deliver on those good intentions. The Partner elicits admiration and therefore loyalty—a recipe for a stable relationship because there’s no motivation to look elsewhere. As Paul Newman famously said about staying faithful to his life partner, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”
People occasionally move from one quadrant to another, for better or for worse. My favorite example is Bill Gates, whose image changed dramatically in recent years when he went from being the head of powerful, ruthless Microsoft in the 1990s (Predator) to the generous, much-admired philanthropist he is today (Partner). What a concept—a person can use their power for ill or for good! And these choices actually affect how we feel about them and how we want to treat them!
In an earlier article, I said that middlemen aren’t bad—bad middlemen are bad. Now you know exactly what I mean: when people think middlemen are bad, they are thinking only of the Predator and Parasite types. But you can choose to be a Partner—to use your power for the benefit of others, not just yourself. Doing so creates loyal, stable relationships with others.
Being a Partner is not necessarily easy. And it is especially difficult for a middleman—more difficult than it is for other types of businesses-—because by their nature middleman businesses have relationships with two sides. (Lyft and Uber, for example, have relationships with both drivers and passengers, and Amazon has relationships with publishers and with shoppers.) If you are running a middleman business, you must ask yourself who you need to be a Partner to; in other words, whose side are you on? It’s an important and difficult question that I will explore in a future article.
Where to read more
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About the author
Marina Krakovsky is the author of The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit (Palgrave Macmillan). She is also co-author, with economist Kay-Yut Chen, of Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business (Portfolio/Penguin). In her writing, speaking, and consulting, her main focus is on the practical application of ideas from psychology and economics. Her articles and essays have appeared in Discover, the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American and Scientific American Mind, O (The Oprah Magazine), Psychology Today, Slate, FastCompany, the Washington Post, Wired, and more.
A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.