Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

March 11, 2010

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin

Most of us in marketing associate the term “cluster” with a demographic or psychographic segment of consumers. But there is another kind of cluster that gets little discussed even though it can be much more determinative of a marketing effort’s success: engagement clusters.

Marketing doesn’t really revolve around demographic or psychographic clusters despite the considerable sums that companies spend to figure them out. They would likely get a better ROI from making larger investments in engagement cluster research.

So what is an information exchange cluster? It’s a micro environment within a total marketing program where providers and consumers engage in product-related communications.

The term “engagement” signifies what engagement clusters are all about. The first step in the marketplace for marketing to succeed is to secure the conscious, active engagement of customers – prospective and otherwise – in the product information stream. No sale is possible without this first step.

Information exchanges in engagement clusters take place at three information transfer points or nodes: people, places and things:

· People

· Places

· Things (or means)

People. Information exchanges in engagement clusters occur between consumers, between consumers and product providers and between agencies of both consumers and companies. Consumer agencies include direct representatives of a consumer, such as an attorney, financial planner or concerned family member. Also, governmental regulatory bodies and news organizations function as agencies of consumers.

Places. Like Einstein’s special theory of relativity, engagement clusters have time-space elements that need to be taken into account. Places can be in three-dimensional reality, such as a point-of-sale environment in a commercial setting like a mall or in a person’s home. Places can also be virtual in the sense that they have no corporeal substance. Websites, blogs, social networking sites and forums are examples of virtual places that can exist within an engagement cluster.

The timing of invitations to consumers to participate in an engagement cluster can be critical. To express this idea in caricature, it certainly makes no sense to run an ad for Christmas just as Easter is just over the time horizon, or to have characters in a summertime ad in wintry dress.

Time also needs to be considered in the abstract. For example, in marketing housing and care services to seniors, any sense on the part of consumers that they have a need for such typically lies dormant until they experience a health set-back.

Things. These nodes facilitate or catalyze information exchanges. They include advertisements, news articles, and consumer rating systems such as Amazon’s product reviews by consumers. They also include technological artifacts as simple as a “FORWARD” command on an email client or a hot link to a website.

Marketing has traditionally been mostly executed in the format of a monologue which renders consumers as passive participants in the information exchange process. In fact, most marketing still remains a unidirectional information delivery process despite consumers’ growing perceptions that one-way marketing communications reflect marketers’ desires to manipulate consumers’ minds.

The need to accommodate consumers’ growing resistance to the unidirectional information streams of traditional marketing has magnified the importance of giving attention to engagement clusters because this is where buying decisions are conceived, gestate and are born.

In the next post I will give attention to what you can do to increase the intensity of the dialogue that takes place within engagement clusters that form around your product.

March 11, 2010 in Advertising, Behavior, Boomers, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Decision processes, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 26, 2010

Ten Most Addictive Sounds

Check out this piece from Fast Company magazine. It could change what you do in your next marketing campaign.

February 26, 2010 in Advertising, Brain, Consumer Behavior, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 25, 2010

Empathy Is a Pain

Psychologist Russell Church crawled out on a big limb in 1959 and published a paper, "Emotional reactions of rats to the pain of others." That was back when scientists put quotation marks around the words like “emotions,” “empathy” and “grief” when connecting them to animal behavior. Most scientists labored under the misguided belief that only humans had emotions.

Today, the quotation marks have been removed. Scientists now generally acknowledge that empathy is a powerful emotion that predates man’s existence on both an evolutionary and time scale. And it obviously has great survival value to a species.It's a crucial property of social bonding.

But how well do we understand empathy? And what is the difference between empathy and sympathy, sometimes used synonymously?

Which word applies to "the ability to enter into, understand, or share somebody else's feelings?"

Sympathy. Sympathy wells up when you feel bad about someone else’s unfortunate circumstances.

Empathy is sharing feelings, good or bad with someone. More specifically, empathy is the act of identifying with and understanding another person’s circumstances, emotions and motives. People all too commonly associate empathy with symphony. But you never feel happy when you feel sympathetically about a person’s circumstances.

On the other hand, feeling happy because good friends of yours just become new parents is an expression of empathy. (Or maybe it’s a couple of decades later and your friends just became empty nesters!)

The key difference between empathy and sympathy lies in the words, “identify with and understand.” You don’t need to understand the misfortune that has befallen a person to feel sympathetic toward them. But empathy requires some level not only of understanding but of identification with a person’s “circumstance, emotions and motives.”

Having said all that, I feel that empathy does not get the attention in marketing that it deserves.

A persistent argument in customer relationship management is that people don’t want everyone they buy from to be a friend. Customers will even tell you the same thing if you ask them. But almost everyone prefers dealing with someone who can identify with their circumstances (needs), emotions and motivations. How else can the seller take customer service to its loftiest limits?

A serious challenge that marketers face in trying to signal their empathy for customers is coming across as sympathetic or worse, as condescending. Marketing that calls attention to a person’s possible unfortunate circumstances (“Help! I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up) will work with some people but not most.

The trouble is, that declaration of an untoward event violates a cardinal principle of marketing espoused by the late, great David Ogilvy. He once said something to the effect, “People buy products that project images of who they want to be, not of who they don’t want to be.” No one wants to be sprawled across a floor after tripping on a rug.

Managing an empathetic tone in marketing communications is not simply a matter of choosing the right words. If getting the words right drives the process chances are you’ll end up with an ad that is not authentic to the sensitive ear of the consumer. The older your intended market the more likely this will happen. Sensitivity to nuance or “between the lines” meaning tends to increase with age.

Older people, like pets and little children, often have an uncanny ability to know what is really on your mind. So, for empathetic expression to persuade people that you truly identify with and understand their circumstances, emotions and motives, it needs to be authentic.

February 25, 2010 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Customer Relations, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 25, 2010

The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

I stole the title of this posting from an article in the January 2010 issue of Wired magazine.

The Wired article caught my attention because of a new book I’m writing called Brave New Worldview. The main theme of my book is that we generally see the world through the lens of a three-centuries old worldview that is hopelessly inadequate for dealing with many issues we face in the 21^st century.

We still define the world in which we live in terms of mechanistic properties framed by Isaac Newton. We especially covet the predictability of Newtonian science. For example, mainstream economics rests on the premise that the twists and turns of markets are generated by people acting rationally in their own interests. This makes it possible to predict t markets with a high degree of accuracy – or so economists have long believed. However as late as midyear 2008 – the year of the great Crash of 2008 – no prominent economist saw the Crash coming.

A review of economists’ record in economic forecasting reveals a dismal record. Shockingly, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told John Stuart on the Daily Show, “I’ve been in the forecasting business for 50 years. I’m no better than I was and nobody else is. Forecasting was as good or bad 50 years ago as it is today.”

Newtonian science rests on a platform created by the French philosopher René Descartes. As the founder of the scientific method Descartes proposed that nothing should be considered true until specifically shown to be. He left no room for probability. Something either was or it wasn’t. It was to be or it was not to be. Uncertainty, paradox and discontinuity had no place in science. Yet, as things have turned out, much of our lives now turn on such states. They are at the very core of quantum mechanics, the foundation of contemporary information technology.

Descartes prescribed the steps needed to determine the truth of a proposition. His method precluded any subjective input such as intuition. He called for total objectivity. That can only exist when the data produced by an investigation is always the same regardless of who conducts it. And therein lies the reason I wanted to bring up the Wired article.

The prohibition against nonobjective activities in classic science is so strong that when data in an experiment varies from what the scientist expected he is typically disposed to repeat the experiment multiple times while expecting each time the outcome will conform to his original expectations. Finally, 50 to 75 percent of the “surprise” data is abandoned according to Kevin Dunbar who studies how scientists study things.

Dunbar said, “It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense. “

The Wired article goes on to talk about how “psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists – our views dictated by nothing but the facts – we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories.”

Dunbar has fingered the part of the brain that functions as an anomaly detector. Neuroscientists often refer to this as part of the “Oh shit” circuit. For the neuroscientists reading this it’s the anterior cingulated cortex. When the ACG has been engaged a person looks for the reason for sudden discomfort with an outcome. “Perhaps it’s the method,” they might say. Or they may blame the unexpected results on a machine malfunction.

The absence of an “Oh shit” response by people who don’t already have a mental model of what should happen is why so many breakthroughs in science have been by people working outside their field. For instance, Watson and Crick, the reputed discoverers of DNA were not biologists. It’s a matter of not knowing enough to know what is supposed to happen or having a fear of taking the wrong steps in light of previous experience.

Brain scientists have figured out that the analytical left brain bears a lot of responsibility for rejecting data that doesn’t conform to expectations. So much for left brain objectivity! On the other hand, the emotional (and curious) right brain welcomes anomalous data. It seems that subjective mindedness has a larger role in science than Descartes imagined.

So, the next time you have differences with another person on choosing a course of action try to determine whether your position (or that of your adversary) has originated in the status quo-seeking left brain or in the more adventuresome right brain.

P.S. Be sure to read the Wired article that inspired this post.

January 25, 2010 in Behavior, Brain, Decision processes, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

January 19, 2010

A Neurological Reason for Injecting More Right Brain into Our Worldview

Reader and brand manager par excellence Tony Kirton was moved by yesterday's post about a whole brain approach to viewing the world to send me the URL to an awesome article on the topic that appeared in the January 2, 2010 issue of the Wall Street Journal: http://tinyurl.com/yhfly5z Consider it a must read!

January 19, 2010 in Behavior, Brain | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

January 18, 2010

Avoiding the Half Brain Syndrome in Marketing Research

Have you seen the TED video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a massive hemorrhagic stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain?

Taylor is a neuroanatomist. This gave her unique insight into her stroke as it unfolded.

A hemorrhagic stroke is heavy duty trauma. In Taylor’s case it shut down her left cortical hemisphere, the side associated with speaking, reasoning and analytical activities. She was left with just the right hemisphere to view and interpret events coming within the reach of her consciousness. It rendered the world far differently from the one she experienced before the stroke. She lost all sense of any boundaries between where she began and ended. She felt part of a splendid whole that infused her with an eerie euphoria. At first it didn’t matter that the stroke had silenced the verbal centers of her left brain. As the stroke continued unfolding she became vividly aware that the right brain and left brain are of two different minds, neither of which is capable by itself of giving an accurate read on reality.

Dr. Taylor’s story bears an important metaphorical caveat for economists, investment analysts, marketers and others who try to foretell the future base on mathematical reductions of reality. It takes both sides of the brain to come up with an accurate picture of reality. The analytical left brain for all its powers of logic and reasoning cannot do it on its own. Einstein knew that. He famously observed, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Wall Street “quants” – those analysts who live by numbers – have come in for some sharp criticism in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crash. Macroeconomists have also taken in on the chin because none of any prominence saw the Crash coming. In fact, the party line well into 2008 is that the year would experience modest growth.

A dozen years ago I wrote an article for American Demographics about huge shortcomings in quantitative market research. It produced by far the largest number of reader responses in the magazine’s history. I don’t know how many ended up on the editor’s desk but I received over 400 emails, many expressing the thanks for letting them know why market research so often misses the mark.

Market research is a more than $6 billion industry. The fact that some 90 percent of new products and product line extensions fail suggests that much of that $6 billion dollars is needlessly wasted. At the core of the problem is the dearth of understanding of human behavior among researchers.

A number of prominent entrepreneurs have a deep distrust of statistically grounded research, particularly in consumer research. These include Phil Knight (Nike), Steve Jobs (Apple), Howard Schultz (Starbucks) and Scott Cook (Intuit). Scott Bedbury, who helped Phil Knight turn Nike into an international brand had this to say about traditional consumer market research:

The greatest problem with relying on traditional methodologies … is that they provide management with reams of statistical data, which may tempt those lacking in confidence to go against their common sense and gut intuition.. That, to put it mildly, is not the Nike way. In fact, prior to my first interview with Phil Knight, I had been specifically advised to avoid mentioning the words “marketing” or “research” in speaking with him. Apparently, he regarded both words as symbolic of what is wrong with most businesses.

After helping Knight turn Nike into one of the world’s best-known brands, Bedbury hired on with Howard Schultz to do much the same for Starbuck’s. Again, he found himself working for an entrepreneur with a strong bias against quantitative consumer research.

Intuit founder Scott Cook puts great faith in anthropological, aka ethnological research. Cook sent employees into stores to “pick up” customers who had just bought an Intuit product. They were to accompany customers home to see how they integrated their Intuit purchase into their lives. Cook wanted to give customers accounting products that reflected their way of doing business.

Cook’s choice of anecdotal research over statistical research played a major role in making Intuit the leader in domestic and small business accounting software. Unable to compete effectively, Bill Gates made a move to buy Intuit. However the SEC scotched the proposed marriage and Intuit went on to become even more dominant in its market niche.

I’ll close with another Einsteinian bit of wisdom: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. All the entrepreneurs I just cited obviously buy into that wisdom. I wonder how many of my readers do.

P.S Be sure to watch Jill Bolte Taylor's incredible story.

January 18, 2010 in Behavior, Brain, Consumer Research, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

December 29, 2009

Season's Greetings from the World’s Largest Plant

(This is a reprint of an essay I have run before, usually at this time of year. As we leave the Winter Holiday Season and head off into a new year, Despite the fractiousness that has saturated public discourse throughout 2009, we all are connected. No sector of society stands apart from any other sector. This essay presents a metaphorical look at why we really have no other rational choice than to pull together regardless of our place in society or our political label if we are to quickly recover from the ravages of the Great Recession of 2009.)

P.S. A reader informed me that a larger mushroom exists in Oregon and that technically mushrooms are not regarded as plants. Oh well ... details.)

Several years ago a great discovery was announced. The largest known plant in the world had been found in Michigan. It was a single mushroom plant covering more than 100 acres.

Looking over its vast surface in full flower, one sees thousands upon thousands of mushroom caps looking like a multitudinous crowd of individual tiny people huddled together under little white umbrellas. But below ground every stem is connected to every other stem. This amazing plant seems a marvelous metaphor for us human beings – individuals on the surface, but one organism deep down.

Developmental psychologist Dan McAdams writes in Stories We Live By about two “fundamental modalities” that organize human needs, desires and goals: agency and communion. He describes agency as “the individual’s striving to separate from others, to master the environment, to assert, protect and expand the self. The aim is to become a powerful and autonomous ‘agent.’” He describes communion as “the individual’s striving to lose his or her self by merging with others, participating in something larger than self, and relating to others in warm, close and loving ways.”

Thinking about that giant mushroom, if each cap had a mind of its own, how much mental energy might each cap devote to asserting its self while losing sight of its connection to the whole? But on further thought I realize that in spite of each cap’s illusion of distinctiveness and autonomy, the will of the whole 100-acre plant works ceaselessly below the surface to help organize the needs, desires and goals of each individual cap.

Readers may recall my previous discussions of the “psychological center of gravity” hypothesis. People within five years of the adult median age make up the PCG and have a disproportionate influence on cultural themes and trends. With an adult median age of 45, today’s PCG is bracketed by the ages of 40 and 50, making it the oldest PCG in U.S. history.

Several years ago the Wall Street Journal carried an article that reflected today’s middle age PCG’s influence on teens. It told of an unprecedented flocking of teenagers to churches and synagogues in search of meaning in life – a quest traditionally more typical of people in midlife.

In many instances, teens are following a course that runs counter to parental atheism. The WSJ article viewed this as a form of rebellion, observing, “It doesn’t hurt, of course, that spiritualism and ritual permeate today’s popular culture.” The article noted Madonna’s study of Jewish mysticism, Alanis Morrisette and Puff Daddy’s references to spirituality in their music, teen clothing lines devoted to the dark, mystical-looking “Goth” fashion, and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul’s long-running position on bestseller lists.

But is the unprecedented number of teenagers pouring into houses of worship merely an act of mass rebellion? Is growing teen attraction to ancient rites of mysticism simply another fad that will soon pass? The ROI of untold product promotional dollars rides on the answer.

If the PCG hypothesis is valid, increased adolescent interest in spirituality will not be short-lived. It will remain in force over the next decade as the PCG ages more. The subterranean workings of the collective whole, influenced by the PCG, will continue to help organize the values, needs and goals of teens.

Ironically for a nation that has long exalted the values of the young, marketers to teens can gain keen insights into the values and behavior of today’ teens by learning more about the values and behavior of the middle-aged consumers who make up the PCG.

None of this is to say that teens are developmentally entering midlife decades ahead of Nature’s schedule. They simply are tapping into midlife themes, although they experience those themes in the context of their untested adolescent worldviews.

Today’s middle-aged PCG presents marketers with an extraordinary challenge: weaving the themes of midlife values into messages for the young in ways that feel comfortable and cool to them.

The PCG’s influence on teens supports the idea that below the surface we are one, just like myriad white buttons that belong to the world’s largest plant. Much of who we are as well as what we need and desire flows from that oneness regardless of our age.

In these days of overly expressed agency, it seems to me that giving more attention to the communion that binds us together as one would help extend the feelings of togetherness that we feel so strongly at this time of year throughout the rest of the year.

May 2009 unfold for you one an all as a truly great year!

December 29, 2009 in Behavior, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Trends, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 30, 2009

Achieving Meaningful Online Engagement in Boomer Markets

I want to talk about a new book called Dot Boom. But I must make a full disclosure first. The book is by David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, founders of the online ad agency, Immersion Active. Immersion Active is the sponsor of the Ageless Marketing blog.

But wait. There is more. The theoretical foundation of Dot Boom is my own book Ageless Marketing. So, the question is, under these circumstances how could I be a neutral book reviewer? I guess the answer is I cannot be. However, that doesn’t have to nullify everything I might say about Dot Boom. It might simply alert you to give my words a bit more scrutiny than you might otherwise give a book review. Fair enough?

First, because Immersion Active concentrates exclusively on online marketing to boomers and older customers, one might be tempted to pass up this book. However, the underlying principles set forth in Dot Boom apply to markets in general, regardless of age. In other words, Dot Boom is really a book about ageless marketing.

I want to focus most on what I think is Dot Boom’s most noteworthy contribution to marketing theory – What Weigelt and Boehman call “Meaningful Online Engagement.” The sources of Internet user metrics are many, but Weigelt and Boehman introduce a new concept which by my lights is ultimately the most important metric of all: how many users get meaningfully involved in a website or online campaign? Page views, click-through counts and even transactions don’t make that determination.

The Immersion Active team has developed a scoring system that can be used in advance of launching a campaign or new website that will predict the likely extent of meaningful online engagement. You can try out the scoring system here.

What is meaningful online engagement (MOE)? First it is a holistic measure of users’ interest in an online experience. Typical metric systems tend to reflect a bias toward one category of data or another. MOE data combine to present a whole picture. Instead of just quantitatively reflecting a user’s level of engagement MOE data adds a qualitative dimension by taking into account influences on online behavior that do not originate within a website owner’s environment .

For example, a user may visit a site on because someone she trusts recommended that her readers check out the site. Further investigation might reveal that the blogger has influenced many people to visit various sites. Bingo! The marketer now has a new avenue to recruit sales leads.

Weigelt and Boehman boldly offer readers a new definition of marketing that makes more sense to me than the one adopted by the American Marketing Association in 2007. I might comment that AMA periodically changes the definition of marketing, but each new definition seems to have come out of the minds of a committee of academics. Weigelt’s and Boehman’s definition of marketing is straightforward: The exchange of information within a topic.

That definition of marketing comports with a growing trend to view business and all its transactional elements in terms of ecosystems. Flora and fauna in natural ecosystems, for example, exchange information in many ways on a continuing basis. They sell themselves in ways that should make a denizen of Madison Avenue envious. Ecosystems are characterized by an intricate system of networks that reflect complex interdependencies between participant in the ecosystem. Weigelt and Boehman chart out markets in similar fashion and propose a system of metrics to assess interest and activity levels among participants in the marketing ecosystems they design for clients.

Dot Boom is definitely reflects the cutting edge of marketing. There is no reason not to click on the book cover in the left column and read it.

November 30, 2009 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Boomers, Consumer Behavior, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 18, 2009

WalMart's Sustainability Campaign

P.S. to yesterday's post:

See this piece http://tinyurl.com/ygxdoz4 from today's Fast Company Now Daily email report -- which if you don't get you should. Check out the hot link items as well.

November 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 16, 2009

The Maturation of Walmart

Who am I – now that I’m not who I was? As indicated in my last post those words form the title of a new book by a friend. Everyone reading this can aptly ask their selves that question because we are indeed never who we were at any point in life. However, certain milestones in our developmental journey through life that stands out more prominently than others. The onset of the midlife quest for self-realization is one such milestone.

I have proposed that brands as well as people experience developmental milestones. To survive, brand personalities must evolve over time to stay in sync with changes in the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times.

From the world’s most recognized brand Coca-Cola to P & G’s Tide, successful brands continuously change. Sometimes changes are superficial, like they are when the only New and Improved! is a revised container design. In other cases, changes are systemic and of such magnitude that few aspects of the company behind the brand are unaffected. Walmart is a case in point.

Walmart began life as a value-based brand: Everyday low prices everyday! It remains committed to that brand promise. However, Walmart appears to be transitioning to a more mature-minded and socially responsible brand. Some colleagues of mine are more cynical. They believe that Walmart has joined the green marketing brigade strictly for bottom line reasons.

That response raises an issue that marketers need to be careful about in changing a brand’s image. Unless changes are consistent with the market’s past perceptions of the brand’s personality consumers may consider the changes to be inauthentic. Walmart certainly faces a big challenge in that regard as it steers toward a more socially responsible path. Its history is checkered with charges of unfair labor practices, worker exploitation, sex discrimination and other alleged sins against society.

Nevertheless I do believe that Walmart’s more mature self is genuinely concerned about social issues. Walmart surprised many when it was one of the first major companies to endorse the idea of healthcare reform. It has dramatically changed its practices regarding worker benefits. It is having a large and growing impact on the green movement. For example, it took the lead in negotiating with Phillips and GE, the world’s largest makers of incandescent lights bulbs, to phase them out over time. This was a huge accomplishment given the annuity value of a product that has to be continuously replaced over short periods of time.

In a sense, Walmart (in my judgment) is transitioning from its brash, arrogant, ambitious youthhood into a more reserved, respectful and balanced personality of the kind associated with people well along the Jungian path to self-realization. It has long been one of the world’s most admired brands in the business world because of its astonishing record of success. However, it has also from suffered intensely antagonistic attitudes in communities foresworn to block them from setting up shop within their boundaries. Even many customers have had strongly negative feelings about Walmart even as they could not resist shopping at a Walmart because of its pricing.

As I see it, Walmart is maturing as a brand personality in a manner that is in sync with the zeitgeist. It stands as a model that marketers of other brands would do well to study. Again, Who am I – now that I’m not who I was? Walmart appears to know the answer for itself. What about any brands you’re associated with?

November 16, 2009 in Behavior, Consumer Behavior, Customer Relations, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

October 26, 2009

Dissolving a Brand’s Persona to Reveal its Authentic Essence

A good bit of our youthful psychic energy is spent trying to look better than we really think we are. Call it the marketing of the self. In societies modern and primitive this timeless ritual plays a crucial role in perpetuating the species. Randy males compete with each other to wrest away the affections of comely lasses who are just as much consumed with marketing themselves.

Humans, of course, are not the only members of the animal kingdom who devote a huge amount of effort trying to find the most desirable mate. It comes with the territory, as they say. Every spring the world is awash in hormones serving the cause of continuity for millions of species from the tiniest insects to the mightiest of mammals. Wild and often buffoonish dances, shameless preening, and the music of a million voices attend this massive cosmic annual ritual.

Freud has been bitterly criticized for seeing human behavior primarily through the lens of a worldview rich in sexual hues. But a serious review of modern advertising will reveal the fact that the worldview through which marketers view consumer behavior is not all that far out of sync with Freud’s perspective.

Carl Jung, who started his professional life deeply enamored with Freud’s ideas ultimately broke away from Freud in a famously bitter estrangement because long before feminists took on Freud he though the good Austrian head doctor attributed too much credit to sex for human behavior. In contrast with Freud’s sex-drenched definition of the libido,

Jung saw the libido in more cosmic terms representing the irrepressible desire of people to recreate themselves in all they do. In the first half of life this desire has a strong biological foundation instilled in our genes by nature to ensure continuation of the species. However, in the second half of life, the libido expresses desires to recreate the self in less materialistic, more symbolic ways, such as in one’s good works or “giving back” to others as part of one’s legacy. This is one way people know they can live on, even if it's only in the minds of others.

After the chases of our youthful selves are but memories, we still need to market ourselves, though we do it in much different fashion. Most of us become inclined to look down on the streaks of artifice that marbled our lives when we were young. We are now on a path toward self-realization. this is the Holy Grail in human personality development. At long last we may find the answer to the biggest question that ever arises in our minds: "Who am I?"

Getting the answer to that question is frighteningly difficult when we are in hot pursuit of careers, intimate partners and social status. A big hurdle is that we tend to see ourselves as we present our masked selves to the outside world. Affectations become an admixture in our self-images. Only when we begin to explore the gaps between our social self and our real self can we begin to get close to the answer to “Who am I.” In this process authenticity comes to replace artifice in the long the long road to self-realization.

Brands can be managed to follow a similar path away from the artifice of an undeveloped persona toward a more authentic brand self.

Marketers earn consumers’ sustained attention and loyalty by connecting the dots between a brand and worldviews, self-images, values and aspirations of consumers. But a big problem today is that much of marketing remains rooted in the more narcissistic and materialistic (sex-enriched) tonalities of youth. Many brands still sport personas that become increasingly irrelevant as the mind of the market continues growing older and more mature.

It is well known by those with a well-grounded understanding of brand management that changing a brand's personality is rarely successful. Just recall the “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign, for a classic example of a failed effort to change a brand’s personality.

However, like people, brands can and indeed should evolve along a path of maturation. This retains their relevance to the ever-changing mind of the market. It enables them to reach ever higher levels of expression – the same objective of Jung’s self-realization and Maslow’s self-actualization.

Keeping in mind that a brand’ is an anthropomorphic representation of consumers’ values, managing the dissolution of its persona to reveal the brand’s authentic self requires a deft hand. The marketer must have keen awareness of the difference between style and substance. On that point, take note: The persona of youth is about style; the quest for the answer to the question, "Who am I?" is about substance.

A dear friend of mine, former NPR reporter Connie Goldman, just wrote a book about the quest for the real self in midlife, Who Am I - Now That I'm Not Who I Was? A whole lot of brands don't know the answer to that question. They need to get with the program and find the answer that is better suited to the mind of the market today..

NEXT: Several examples of companies that are doing a good job dissolving brand personas.

October 26, 2009 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Decision processes, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 24, 2009

Worldviews: Key to Understanding the Difference Between Brand Persona and Brand Personality

Paraphrasing George Burns’ famous witticism about sincerity, authenticity is everything in marketing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. My good friend Joe Pine and his partner Jim Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy recently came out with a new book on the growing importance of authenticity in business entitled simply Authenticity.

From the earliest snake oil salesmen, authenticity has been a high priority in marketing and sales. But two recent events are making that disposition dangerous to the health of a company and its brands. The Internet is of course one of those events. The second emerged about the same time the Internet entered mainstream culture. It was the seismic demographic shift that turned people 40 and older into the adult majority.

Today, adults in the second half of life outnumber younger adults by 140 million to 91 million – and the gap is still widening. This has produced profound changes in the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times. It now reflects the more seasoned worldviews and values typical of people in the second half of life.

The annals of adult development psychology are richly laden with clues for understanding the mind of the market today. However, because few people in marketing and sales have any grounding in developmental changes that take place in the second half of life, consumer behavior is less well understood today than it was before the emergence of the New Adult Majority.

A person’s perceptions, thoughts and decisions are processed through the lens of his or her worldview. Famed science writer Danah Zohar defines worldview as

A theme which integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world – to Nature and other creatures, to the environment as a whole, to the planet, the universe, and ultimately to God – to some overall purpose and direction. A successful worldview must, in the end, draw all these levels – the person, the social, and the spiritual – into one coherent whole. If it does so, the individual has access to some sense of who he is, why he is here, how he relates to others, and how it is valuable to behave.

No one would argue that dramatic changes in worldview take place as a person moves from childhood into adolescence and from there into adulthood. Less well grasped are the equally dramatic changes that take place as a person moves into and through the second half of life. Mostly, as actors in our own stories, we mostly see these changes only in retrospect, often years after they have altered our course in life.

Carl Jung chose the term persona to represent the image we want to represent our personality in the outside world. Persona is Latin for mask. Following childhood in the first half of life, we devote considerable attention to conforming our mask to what we believe will gain us the most fortuitous outcomes in our relations with our peers and others. Knowledge of this has been the mainstay of marketing ever since N. W. Ayer & Son opened as the U.S.’s first advertising agency in Philadelphia in 1859.

Since then, marketing has dominated by an ethos steeped in the narcissistic, materialistic values of the youthful self. Sex has been the armature around which the threads of most marketing messages have been wound – including much children’s advertising as demonstrated by Barbie since 1959.

Much of traditional advertising approaches are out of sync with the worldviews that are dominant in today’s middle age and older person dominated consumer population. But not a lot of evidence exists indicating much awareness of this crucial fact.

In Jungian theory, the onset of midlife is accompanied by internal forces that incline a person toward a more introspective, individuated and more autonomous self. People begin examining their lives less in terms of “Me” and more in terms of “We.” Questions arise about one’s life purpose and the meaning of life itself. Men tend to peel back layers of the persona to get more in touch with the feminine aspects of their personality. Women do the same thing, revealing the inner masculine of their real personality.

Uncovering the real personality is the main developmental task in the second half of life. Accomplishing this task, which Jung referred to as self-realization, requires dissolving the persona, no easy task. And marketers aren’t helping these days.

Marketing messages to the middle age and older population remain saturated with narcissistic and materialistic values. In larger part this is because most marketing messages are created by people who are not far enough along in their own personal development to understand the difference between persona and personality. However, understanding this difference is crucial in a marketplace dominated by a very different worldview than marketers were accustomed to before the emergence of the New Adult Majority.

NEXT: Dissolving a brand’s persona to reveal an authentic essence.

October 24, 2009 in Advertising, Behavior, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 18, 2009

Branding: How Many in Marketing Really Understand What Branding Is About?

Perhaps nothing is more misunderstood in marketing than brand husbandry – what Margaret Marks and Carol Pearson in The Hero and the Outlaw incisively call “meaning management. “ Indeed, more than a few marketers have disdained the value of managing the meaning of products.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers declared 15 years ago in a Marketing Tools article, “Once any marketer takes over the customer relationship, the consumer will have very little need for a mass-marketed name brand.” Of course Peppers, with a background in direct marketing reflects the traditional inattention to branding in the world of direct marketing.

The advent of the Internet delivered the coup de grace to branding in the minds of many marketers. But like one-to-one marketing gurus Peppers and Rogers, those who believe that way don’t understand the dynamics of branding, and indeed the contribution that branding can make to a balance sheet. Of Coca-Cola’s $127 billion market cap, $66 billion is attributed to brand equity. As such, Coke is the most valuable brand in the world, beating out such formidable behemoths as IBM, Microsoft, General Electric and Toyota.

Those who denigrate the importance of branding would do well to read Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson’s The Hero and the Outlaw (at the left under “Must Reads”).

Drawing on extensive quantitative analysis, Mark and Pearson illuminate the qualitative aspects of brand personalities. They infer from their research results that brands fall within 12 archetypal personalities ranging from Pepsi’s and Harley-Davidson’s Rebel archetype to Hallmark’s and Victoria’s Secret’ Lover archetype.

Consumers evaluate brands through human personality traits, whether or not the marketer has imputed human traits to the brand. The brain unconsciously makes anthropomorphic readings of products as part of its efforts to make sense of what it is processing – which brings us to a critically important but much overlooked fact: according to cognitive scientists, 95 percent of the mental activity that goes into forming our perceptions, thoughts and decisions takes place outside of consciousness.

So what do most marketers and market researchers focus most of their attention on? The five percent zone. To truly appreciate the value of branding it helps to understand the neurological side of the branding picture that lies outside the boundaries of consciousness.

A Duke University study found that brands, somewhat unique among proper nouns, are processed primarily in the emotional, sensuous right brain. That and other research indicate that brand loyalty depends on emotional arousal. As with humans, we will reject brands that lack attractive and consistent personality characteristics.

One researcher who commented on the Duke study opined, “This is very intriguing indeed. It supports our instinctive belief that brands are a special class of word - they are like a poem all in one word in their ability to evoke and express ideas."

In recent study in which subjects’ responses in a Coke vs. Pepsi blind taste test were tracked by fMRI technology, researchers found that brain responses indicated a somewhat even split in beverage preference. However, matters changed dramatically when researchers told people which cola they were drinking. Coke was preferred by 75% to 25%. The fMRI scans showed that when people knew they were drinking Coke, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which are related to memory and cognitive control, both got excited. In most cases Pepsi did not have the same effect.

People’s brains appear to process Coke with greater animation in regions of the brain associated with archetypal imagery than Pepsi does. People’s imagery of Pepsi does not appear to be as deeply rooted. It’s all a matter of crucial differences in brand personality that Pepsi will never be able to resolve regardless of money spent in marketing or the creative talents of marketing creatives. Coke long ago took possession of the deeper recesses of most cola drinkers’ brains, and the odds of being booted out are virtually nil.

Next: Brand persona vs. brand personality.

October 18, 2009 in Advertising, Behavior, Brain, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: archetypes, branding, Coke vs, meaning management, Pepsi taste tests, unconscious decision-making

October 03, 2009

How the Subjective Voice in Market Messaging Differs from the Objective Voice

“I’m being logical, damn it!” shouted the CFO in a client company as he slammed his fist on the conference room table. This man of numbers never brought emotions into his decision-making, or so he would have me believe.

Ever since French philosopher Rene Descartes postulated the foundations of modern scientific methodology, emotions have been viewed as a kind of cerebral funhouse mirror that distorts truth.

The irony of that view is that logic can outdo emotions when it comes to producing distorted pictures of reality. In fact, emotions tend to be better in capturing the essence of reality. Consider, for example, intuition. It is an insight derived from emotion, not rationale processes. How would you define emotions? The correct answer makes it clearer why emotions can more faithfully represent reality minds than analysis and reason often does.

Simply defined, emotions are changes in body states. They are comprised of electrochemical responses to a matter that generate changes in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, adrenalin flow and among other body states. As such, emotions are analogs of reality. Like the a fuel gauge’s needle, emotions move in direct proportion to that which activates their movement..

So how is it that people often distort reality when they are upset? Because they view a matter through a cognitive lens that distorts reality. Any representation of truth can be justified through impeccably drawn analysis and reasoning that nevertheless distorts reality. This accounts for difference between people in a wide spectrum of beliefs ranging from politics and culture to science and religion.

Another factor in distortion of reality is the role played by feelings. Contrary to custom, feelings and emotions are not synonymous. Emotions are changes in body states. Feelings represent our interpretation of why body states have changed. Those interpretations turn out to be distortions of reality.

Emotions originate in two places in the brain. The primary source is an organ in the midbrain called the amygdala. This where instinctual emotions, sometime jokingly referred to as the Four Fs arise: fighting, fleeing, feeding and reproducing. The second source is the right prefrontal cortex, which gives rise to cognitive emotions. Road rage arises in the amygdala. The ability to control it arises in the prefrontal cortex.

Cognitive emotions turn us from cavemen into civilized human beings. They are the mental tool that gave us to keep raw nature in our behavior in check. So the next time someone blasts you with their horn while giving you the finger, you may want to yell out at them , “Caveman!” Of course if you do that you are behaving like a caveman (or cavewoman). With that bit of neuroanatomy we can now address the issue raised the previous post, the subjective voice in market messaging versus the objective voice.

The subjective voice is rooted in emotions and reflects a right brain bias. It is a voice that gives expression to emotions, instinctual behavior, intuition and it revels on discovery. It conveys a keen sense of the whole picture, the forest if you will, and parses reality more in terms of relationships than categories.

The left brain-biased objective voice gives expression to rationality, analysis, logic and a sense of caution. It projects reality more in terms of categories than relationships. The objective voice expresses its view of reality in linear fashion with a greater focus on details than on the whole picture. The accompanying chart summarizes the definitive properties of subjective and objective voices. Keep in mind that no one operates exclusively in one voice or another. In fact, because the right brain is kind of gate keeper to the left brain, to reach even the most rational, logic-driven, left brain mind requires passage through the right brain. The right brain is the issuer of landing rights to the left brain, without which the marketer cannot get a message into the mills of left brain processing.

The young adult brain finds safety in anchoring its worldviews to the detailed, linear, analytic approach to parsing reality that reflects the objective voice. Successful social integration depends on a person’s ability to integrate with a group’s consensus on core issues that define it. The young person must learn and adapt to a group’s social codes, whether a group be for professional or private membership. This is the neuropsychological source of a phenomenon that marketers love: the herd mentality that prominently marks young people’s social behavior.

It is far easier to divine the group mind underlying her behavior than to do so for individual minds on a mass basis. This presents marketers a critical challenge in middle age and older markets because the herd mentality has usually lost most of its influence by the time people are well into midlife. Further complicating matters, developmental changes in the brain incline a person toward less black-and-white certainty about life than he or she experienced as a young adult. A plethora of disappointments, personal hurts, and abandoned dreams has conditioned the older adult to accept reality as a game of chance. This increases a person’s skepticism about when others purport to have the best answers. It also increases the older person’s confidence in his or her take on matters. The become “more resist to enculturation,” in the words of Abraham Maslow.

To conclude, then, a very big reason that marketing appears by many measures to be less effective now than in the pre-Internet, less media-saturated past has less to do with the Internet and an over-abundance of media than commonly claimed. The mind of the market has changed dramatically toward a more subjective foundation, yet marketers are still overwhelmingly speaking with an objective voice.

October 03, 2009 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Boomers, Brain, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Trends, Customer Relations, Decision processes, Human Development, Marketing, Media, Relationship Marketing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

September 28, 2009

A Big Reason Advertising Effectiveness Is Falling That You’ve Probably Never Heard About

You never wake up with quite the same brain you woke up with yesterday. The brain, the theater in which your reality plays out in your mind, is in a constant state of change. This never-ending process began in utero when new neurons formed in your fetal brain at the lightning speed of 250,000 cells a minute.

Ultimately you ended up with about 100 billion neurons. Neurons are very social beings. They connect with and talk with each other via vast numbers of dendrites, root-like structures that form in response to the brain’s experiences. Each neuron has between 5,000 and 50,000 links with other neurons. Incredibly, those neuronal connections exceed in number all the atoms in the universe.

The brain is a complex adaptive system without equal. That term refers to complex systems that are capable of learning and changing in response to experience. From infancy through old age the brain’s number one objective is to promote a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence for its owner. To stay ahead of the curve and keep its owner whole it must constantly change in order to adapt to changing conditions, both internally and externally.

What it takes to secure a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence differs by season of life. Different measures are required to assure a satisfying life for a teen than required for a toddler. And what it takes to yield a satisfying life for a twentysomething is quite different from what it takes for a newly minted middle-ager.

Many changes in the brain’s structure and operations over time are developmental rather than circumstantial. A critically important category of developmental change that scarcely gets any attention in the marketing community is how we think. Marketers easily see that teens think differently than toddlers do, but few appear to recognize differences between adults of varying ages in their thinking styles.

Question: Who is likelier to have the better mind for detail? A fortysomething who has gained in patience over the years or a twentysomething whose energy and multi-tasking makes him or her seem poorly suited to concentrating on detail?

Answer: The highly energetic twentysomething.

The human brain reaches its peak capacity for parsing reality into fine detail in the twenties. It processes information through differentiated thinking, a term referring to reducing reality to absolute definitions and categorically organizing matters by their defining properties. This is the cognitive foundation of certainty that is commonly heard in the conversations of young adults. Black-and-white certainty is less a matter of experience than commonly claimed and more a matter of how the brain works during the young adult years. This thinking style not well-suited to getting the whole picture, but its ability to get the details can be awesomely impressive.

Differentiated thinking largely accounts for the fact that twentysomethings are disproportionately represented among people making great breakthroughs in science. Isaac Newton was 24 when he invented differential calculus. Einstein published his seminal paper on special relativity at 26. Michael Faraday was only 20 when he laid the foundation for the modern study of electromagnetism and built the world’s first electric motor. Darwin was in his early twenties as he began developing his first ideas on the evolutionary origins of species.

In very later 20s and early 30s, our thinking processes begin evolving toward a de-differentiated style. We begin to parse reality less in terms of categories and more in terms of relationships. Our ability to see how things are connected to one another gets better. The whole picture becomes more complete.

The fact that great breakthroughs in the humanities are made disproportionately by people in the second half of life is largely due to advancing skills in dedifferentiated thinking. Artists, musicians, philosophers, architects, statesmen, etc., generally reach their peak performance well after their twenties.

Ponder thinking styles in terms of left brain and right brain thinking. Differentiated thinking is strongly dominated by left brain processes involving reason, logic, categorization and quantitative analysis. Dedifferentiated thinking brings more emotional, relational and qualitative input from the right brain into the total thinking process.

The strong left brain bias of the young mind leads toward a worldview that is more deeply rooted in consensus and objective in orientation. In contrast, the older person’s dedifferentiated thinking supports more right brain input leads toward a more subjective worldview that is deeply connected to one’s own experiences.

Whether a person’s preferred thinking style is objectively grounded or subjectively grounded matters a great deal from a marketing perspective: each position represents a different voice. Despite this, however, there is little awareness of this in the marketing community. As a result, marketing messages intended for people over 40 often fail to connect because they are delivered in a more objective voice than a subjective voice.

This is a matter of overarching importance to consumer business companies. The fact that 142 million adults are 40 and older versus 91 million under 40 means the mind of the market today shows a decided bias toward the subjective voice. Failure to reflect this in marketing messages will automatically reduce message effectiveness.

Thus, while everyone blames falling advertising effectiveness on the Internet and on the steady flood of ads consumers see everywhere on daily basis, one of the biggest reasons of all is totally ignored: few marketers are aware of the voice they must speak in to restore effectiveness to market messages.

Next: How the Subjective Voice in Market Messaging Differs from the Objective Voice

September 28, 2009 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Brain, Consumer Behavior, Customer Relations, Decision processes, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

September 14, 2009

Why Almost Everything You Thought You Knew About Marketing Is Wrong

Whether a marketer should bone up on the brain is passing beyond optional. Not that surveys and focus groups were ever as goof for divining truths about consumers as those conducting them claim, those research methods are now OUT. In marketing matters, neuroscience, along with ethnography, is IN.

Advances in neuroscience over the 25 years I’ve been an avid reader in the subject are astonishing. As I’ve written before, the shift in our views of the human brain and mind are no less epochal than the shift centuries ago from a flat earth to a round earth perspective. Much of what we have believed about how the human mind works has turned out to be as much an illusion as the earth’s flatness is.

Research into the human brain is taking marketing into new dimensions of human behavior that are far beyond the reach of traditional consumer research methods. One of the most intriguing dimensions is the aging brain – a matter of considerable concern to marketers since changes associated with aging begin around the late 30s and early 40s. These changes significantly compromise traditional consumer research methods.

In his illuminating book The Mature Mind psychiatrist and geriatrician Gene Cohen does a splendid job describing in accessible language changes in brain functioning that take place as we age. He uses few five-dollar terms from brain science to get his points across. Importantly, especially for those of us who have left the early years of midlife far behind, Cohen documents how the aging brain is in some important ways a better brain.

In Serving the Ageless Market (McGraw-Hill, 1990), I proposed that some changes in mental functioning associated with age were improperly regarded as handicaps. I proposed that some of these changes were developmental changes that took older minds to higher levels of mental functioning. In The Mature Mind, Dr. Cohen provides new information that supports that idea. In fact, he coined the expression developmental intelligence to stand for that idea.

The idea of developmental intelligence reaching its zenith in the last quarter of life would not be very surprising but for the deep-seated antagonism toward aging our society harbors. That darkly woven bias obscures much of the truth about older minds.

While great breakthroughs in science are most commonly accomplished by people in their 20s, the very best in the humanities has generally flowed from older minds. Twenty-five-year-olds capable of such mental feats as formulating the Special Theory of Relativity are unlikely to produce an equivalent result in philosophy, literature or other branch of the humanities.

We’re seeing far more media attention to aging consumers than we ever had in the past. Corporate America is finally recognizing that overwhelmingly, the greatest number of consumers and the lion’s share of consumer spending is now found in the middle age and older population. What Corporate America has yet to wake up to, however, is the fact that changes in the mind/brain complex that take place in the second half of life make much of what we thought we knew about marketing obsolete.

I'm reminded of the words of Valentine In Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia when reflecting on the scale of change in today's world: The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

In my next post I will review some of the changes that take place in the mind/brain complex that marketers need to know about and accommodate.

September 14, 2009 in Advertising, Aging, Behavior, Boomers, Brain, Consumer Behavior, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

August 24, 2009

The Emerging Importance of Behavioral Science in Economics and Marketing

I bet not many of my readers can't wait till the next book on economics comes out. Well, rarely having any interest myself in such books, I have been quite surprised by the extent to which two recent books from high priests of the dismal science held my attention.

The first book I read was Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely is a pioneer thinker in the new branch of economics called “behavioral economics.” Amazingly, over 235 years after Adam Smith famously claimed that the movement of markets was caused by an “invisible hand” that reflected people’s rational decisions taken on their own behalf, mainstream economics mainstream economists are beginning to suspect that the “rational” part of people’s decisions has been overplayed.

Dan Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize laureate in economics commented, “"Dan Ariely's ingenious experiments explore deeply how our economic behavior is influenced by irrational forces and social norms. In a charmingly informal style that makes it accessible to a wide audience, Predictably Irrational provides a standing criticism to the explanatory power of rational egotistic choice."

I next read George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Akerlof is another Nobel laureate in economics. Shiller is a prominent Yale economist and the Shiller of the widely followed Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Akerlof and Shiller honor John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists in modern times whose 1936 magnum opus, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by titling their book after Keynes term to signify irrational behavior in the marketplace, “animal spirits.”

I was fascinated to learn that when mainstream economists took to Keynesian economics they conveniently left out Keynes’ thinking about how rational behavior was not as prominent in the marketplace as classical economics held. It seems that mainstream economists have a left brain view of the world, one in which everything that happens ultimately has a predictable cause. The idea that some things just happen is an anathema to left brain constructs of reality.

But the esteemed John Maynard Keynes knew that the Newtonian-inspired idea that left brain based reason underlies the comings and goings of markets was wrong-minded in its exclusivity. In the first place, were all human behavior predictable the case would be closed on the ancient quandary of philosophers about whether or not free will exists. The notion that determinism shapes human, hence market behavior forecloses the possibility of free will.

Sadly, the denizens of the marketing profession have by and large had the same mechanistic view of markets. Rather than become in-depth students of human behavior, most marketers have depended on anecdotal and statistical renderings of behavior. To the extent that behavioral science has been part of marketing tradition, it has been pretty much focused on social psychology, a field that is not very concerned with individual behavior independent of social contexts.

But a new dawn appears on the horizon – in marketing as well as in economics. As behavioral economics is beginning to chip away at flawed assumptions about markets from an economic perspective, behavioral marketing is doing the same from a marketing perspective. At long last there is growing recognition among marketers that human behavior cannot be totally reduced to numbers.

Animal Spirits does a superb job of undercutting economists traditional obeisance to numbers – to the reduction of market forces including human behavior to mere statistical constructs. For that reason, I heartily recommend the book (as well as Ariely’s Predictably Irrational) to marketers as well as to all others involved in any aspect of business. Few of us will not be able to read Predictably Irrational without seeing ourselves in some of the experiments Ariely has conducted that show how de minimus the role of rational behavior is in our marketplace behavior.

And aside from supporting Ariely’s thesis, Animal Spirits tells why, as nothing else I’ve read does, the Financial Crash of 2008 occurred. Contrary to the view of many it was not due so much to regulatory failures and greed in corporate executive suites as to the failure of analysts and other investment p

Do yourself a very large favor and get both of these books. You'll gain a better understanding of why economists and markets get it wrong so often.

August 24, 2009 in Behavior, Consumer Behavior, Economic Trends, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

August 07, 2009

A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides

Regular readers will immediately notice the new look of this blog’s banner. The Ageless Marketing Blog is now sponsored by Immersion Active of Frederick, Maryland, the only marketing agency in the U.S. specializing exclusively in online marketing to 40+ markets. Immersion Active’s founders, David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, have recently authored Dot Boom, a book that builds on the principles of ageless marketing that I have articulated. They expand the concept of ageless marketing, adapting it to the challenges the Internet poses to marketers. Their chapter, “A Model for Meaningful Online Engagement” alone is worth the price of the book and then some by a goodly margin.

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Fast Company ran an article last week entitled A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides. It was written by Dan Macsai, a Millennial who reflects on various claims made by sundry authors about Millennial attitudes and behavior. Millennials are generally regarded as those born between 1982 and 2001.

Macsai regards a number of claims made about the attitudes and behavior of Millennials as “half-truths.” Interestingly, however, many of the same claims were made about boomers decades ago. Remember for example when boomers were being called the most selfish generation in history? Macsai talks about Jean M. Twenge’s claim in her book Generation Me that Millennials are absurdly self-involved. “GenMe takes for granted that the self comes first," she says. Forty years or so earlier boomers were first described as the “Me Generation.” The claim was made with the clear implication that boomers were the first generation of youth in history to be consummately self-absorbed.

Macsai sarcastically cites a litany of claims that various authors say distinguish his and his fellow Millennials’ behavior in the marketplace, workplace and play place. But substitute "boomer" for "Millennial" and you come up with how marketers saw boomers decades ago.

For sure there are stylistic differences between boomers in their earlier years and today's Millennials. However; to a remarkable degree the substantive elements of Millennials’ attitudes and behavior mirror the attitudes and behavior of boomers in their youthful years.

I modestly regard myself as something of a “homegrown” expert on generational behavior. I have a 24-year-old daughter named Stephanie who is a Millennial. My oldest is 50-year-old Sabrina who is a boomer. The next two kids, Laura and Karen are boomers, too. Then came my two Gen X-ers, Brian and Michelle. In short, I have sired children in each of marketer's current three favorite generations.

While each of my children have distinct markers of their individuality, like babies crawling across the floor together, all six kids have developed in a more or less predictable fashion. Their development has been consistent with the observations of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, and other luminaries in the field of human development. Even into their middle age years they continue developing in somewhat predictable fashion, all without sacrificing their distinctive individualities.

A focus on consumers in the context of generational positions began in the early 1960s with a landmark agreement between the television ratings organization Nielson and the ABC television network. ABC was running third in the three-network television industry when it came up with an idea for more effectively competing against NBC and CBS.

ABC's audience was somewhat younger than NBC and CBS audiences. ABC sold Nielson on adding to their reports on household viewership reports on viewers by age. This was the foundation of generational marketing. This change in viewership reporting made it possible for ABC to sell advertisers on the idea of getting young people into their brands before they made lifetime decisions. Though research has shown that few consumers make lifetime brand commitments in their youth, claiming such in the early 1960s proved to be a winning marketing ploy for ABC in its quest for increasing the inflow of advertising dollars.

In eschewing sweeping generalizations made about the attitudes and behavior of Millennials in his Fast Company article Dan Macsai has put marketers on notice that they invite disappointing results in their campaigns if they take much of what self-styled experts say on Millennials at face value.

August 07, 2009 in Advertising, Behavior, Boomers, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Research, Demographics, Human Development, Marketing, Millenials, Generation Y | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Ageless Marketing, Boomers, Generation Y, Generations, Millennials

June 28, 2009

From Hucksterism to Healing

(This post first appeared here on June 18, 2004)

When I first introduce an audience to the idea that marketing is morphing from hucksterism to healing, I often see in some people's faces their suspicion that I’m preaching from some New Age gospel.

Most of those faces relax to reflect greater openess to my claims after I display logos of a few companies that have taken on the role of healer and are performing spectacularly. Anthoplogie is one, REI another and Chico’s yet a third. Each brand appears genuinely more interested in solving their customers' problems than in making a sale at any cost in customer relationships.

Each company has abandoned the 20th century marketing paradigm base on bending customers' wills to the marketer's will in order to move more product. They have adopted the 21st century marketing paradigm which is based on building empathetic connections with customers so as to better help them in solving their problems.

For example, Chico's has made size a less self-consious matter in apparel choices by creating its own size metrics: Size 3 sounds a lot better than size 14 to many women.

New Balance is another brand that has taken on the role of healer. It eschews the testosterone-driven messages of Nike and other sneaker makers to focus on the perennial midlife search for life meaning and balance. It makes it O.K. to be introspective and nonagressive in a kinder and gentler way of life.

Melinda Davis explores the moral shift in marketing from hucksterism to healing in her book, The Culture of Desire.

Kevin Roberts’ new book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands also explores the theme of marketer as healer, dubbing companies that practice empathetic healing instead of dispassionate huckstering lovemarks.

Roberts advocates infusing brands with three fundamental lovemark elements: Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy. Mystery enters by drawing on the past, present, and future; the value of myths and icons; and the powers of inspiration; and by tapping into dreams. Sensuality and the five senses can be used to locate touch-points with consumers. Intimacy is created through commitment, empathy, and passion.

Davis and Roberts understand that shifting from a product centric to a customer centric platform for doing business is not about increasing share of wallet as Don Peppers and Martha Rogers advocate via their 1:1 marketing gospel. It’s about increasing share of heart.

June 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

May 23, 2009

Traditional Consumer Research Can't Do the Job

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

What in the world was Einstein on when he, the 20th Century’s greatest scientist, made that statement? Imagine him telling some corporate suit after reading a company financial statement or a numbers-studded proposal for a new marketing campaign, “Your numbers do not refer to reality.”

Numbers are only symbols, and the pictures they add up to are made-up pictures, not real pictures. A numbers-rendered picture inevitably omits important details.

Quant research draws statistical pictures of consumers based on what they tell researchers. Often, focus groups are used to confirm what the numbers say. However, the primary assumption underlying each type of research is deeply flawed.

Famed neurologist Richard Restak indicates why when he says, “We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives and other mental activities may be possible.”

Brain scan technology supports Restak’s observation about the incompleteness of our knowledge of our motivations. More often than we’re inclined to admit, the reasons we give for doing something better fit the category of speculation than reality.

Yet researchers confidently present clients with statistical renderings of what consumers have told them, unmindful of the fact that motivations initially take root outside the realm of consciousness.

These thoughts are not grainy opinions. They are solidly grounded in new research into the workings of the brain and mind that should inspire us to rely less on the laws of mathematics and more on the laws of behavioral science to divine and forecast consumer behavior.

The problem is, there is too much economic interest in keeping to the old ways in the $6 billion research industry for change to happen overnight. This is one reason why the neurorevolution I talked about in the previous post is moving more slowly than it might. Few traditional researchers have figured out how to make money from this revolution or otherwise compensate for decaying confidence in their practice of reducing human behavior to numbers while ignoring all the evidence that human behavior like the weather defies absolute prediction.

May 23, 2009 in Behavior, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Research, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

May 21, 2009

The Neurorevolution in Marketing

Reader Tony Kirton, a specialist in brand management and former marketing executive in BMW, Audi and Volkswagen has brought to my attention an engaging podcast series on the brain. He believes that new insights into the workings of our brains are certain to lead to a transformation in how we organize and run companies and market our products. I agree with him without reservation.

I read my first book about the brain in 1979: The Brain – The Last Frontier by neurologist Richard Restak. Restak’s book changed the direction of an unending curiosity about human behavior that grew out of my desire as a landscape architect early in my adult life to better understand the behavior of end users of my park, playground and community designs.

By 1985, I had become fully immersed in marketing. The foundation of my evolving views on marketing was brain science. Serving the Ageless Market, which I wrote in the late 1980s, was the first business book to discuss connections between marketing and brain science.

For the better part of two decades I was nearly alone in calling for a new vision of marketing that was grounded in brain science because it was radically changing our understanding of free will, consciousness, memory, motivations and indeed, connections between the mind and the brain.

Now, at long last, such a vision is gaining traction. There is even a new branch of marketing called neuromarketing. Not to be outdone by marketers, practitioners of the dismal science have spawned a new branch of economics called neuroeconomics. Then, covering both fields – and others as well that deal with brain matters – is the new field called neuroethics.

In a Los Angeles Times article , “Searching for the Why of Buy” Robert Lee Hotz talks about the revolutionizing insights into the human brain’s workings made possible by new scanning technology. He wrote, “Much of what was traditionally considered the product of logic and deliberation is actually driven by primitive brain systems responsible for emotional responses — automatic processes that evolved to manage conflicts between sex, hunger, thirst and the other elemental appetites of survival.”

New ways of looking at human (consumer) behavior through the lens of brain science are as radical a departure from past beliefs about behavior as was the shift from seeing the earth as flat to seeing it as round some five centuries ago.

Individuals and companies that ignore how brain research is changing our notions about human behavior are in great danger of being vanquished by competitors who have studied the matter and learned how to put their new knowledge to work.

May 21, 2009 in Brain, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Research, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

May 20, 2009

Does Progress in Marketing Depend on Professors' Deaths?

Next week I am to deliver a talk on an historical moral shift taking place in marketing. My audience will be composed mostly of academics. The occasion is a conference at Bentley University, “Conceptualizing Conscious Capitalism,” May 28-29.

Conscious capitalism is a term coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammad Yunus to describe the practice of business enterprises to consciously fulfill social needs.

My talk will describe how marketing is slowly but inexorably being transformed from a huckstering game to a healing art. I discussed this five years ago in this space.

I am eager to see the response my talk because the moral shift I will talk about nullifies a substantial portion of the books business school students use to learn how to market. Despite lofty expressions on how marketing is about serving customers’ needs, the philosophy of marketing reflects a predator-prey ethos perspective. Compensation systems based on sales quotas have broadly solidified that perspective.

The emergence of Web 2.0 (see here and here)has made the predator-prey model obsolete. Marketing has become a “conversation” to quote Clue Train co-author Doc Searles. Marketer and customer collaborate to determine and meet the customer’s needs. Marketing is no longer about striving to bend the customer’s will to the marketer’s will.

Traditional marketing – the kind taught in B schools – is a power game based on numbers. New marketing is a game of influence based on an understanding of human behavior. This is posing a challenge to those who teach marketing. Few have a deep footing in behavioral science and few books taught from offer students any better footing.

So minimal is the marketing community’s interest in gaining a deep understanding of human behavior, it is possible in business schools across the nation to earn an MBA in marketing without a single course in behavior. Rather than developing an understanding of behavior, most marketers depend more on views taken through the lens of statistics than through the lens of behavioral science.

For those in my audience who think that looking at marketing as a healing art is a bit of New Age fluff, I will offer examples of household name companies that have successfully transformed themselves from hucksters to healers. I cited some of these companies in my first post on this topic five years ago.

As I reflect ahead on my talk I am reminded of Max Planck's famous dictum about how science progresses and wonder how much the same idea applies to marketing. Planck said, "Science progresses with each funeral."

May 20, 2009 in Advertising, Behavior, Consumer Behavior, Customer Relations, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

April 23, 2009

The End of a Myth: The Rational Man Theory of Markplace Behavior

Objective reality is more illusion than substantive. Every magician knows that how we perceive something is often determined less by what we see and otherwise sense than by what goes on in our brains. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s engaging book Phantoms in the Brain brilliantly supports that claim. He cites numerous examples showing how the brain generates illusory renderings of reality.

One of the most common examples of illusory reality is the phantom limb problem that amputees experience. When a legless person feels an itch on an ankle he no longer has it’s because certain neurons in the brain devoted to the missing limb haven’t noticed its absence.

Ramachandran tells of one patient whose brain injury from an auto accident prevents him from recognizing his parents even though he has no trouble remembering and recognizing anyone else.

Another patient does who suffered a right brain stroke denies the paralysis of the left side of her body caused by the stroke. When asked to raise her left arm resting inertly in her lap she said it wasn’t her arm. It belonged to mother who left it in the hospital years ago. Oddly, however, when several drops of cold water were deposited in her left ear, she became fully aware of her paralysis: “Doctor, I can’t raise my left arm because I had a stroke,” she protests when asked to raise it. She remains fully aware of her paralysis for two to 30 minutes after receiving the water drops. Then, she loses all awareness of her paralysis as well as the brief interlude of awareness after the cold water was deposited in her ear.

So you might say that such cases bear no relationship to how you or any other normal person internalizes reality. However, those cases are merely extreme examples in support of the proposition that normal or otherwise our perceptions are fundamentally subjective, meaning our brains ultimately determine what we see.

Take the optical illusion shown here. You perceive the inner circle in the cluster of small circles as larger than the inner circle in the cluster of large circles. The reality is that the inner circles are equal in size. But because the brain relies on comparisons for much of its work, it reckons the size of the inner circle as a proportion of the size of the individual circles in the cluster that surrounds it.

We can draw from this visual illusion an important principle: The brain’s rendering of an object, condition, concept or idea is influenced by comparisons it makes as part of its efforts to understand what it processes.

This principle has been demonstrated in countless research studies. Economist Dan Ariely tells of a number of such studies he has conducted. In one study Lindt chocolate truffles were sharply discounted from 35 cents to 15 cents and Hershey kisses were more modestly discounted to one cent in reflection of significant qualitative differences between the two candies. About 73 percent of the study’s participants chose the heavily discounted higher quality Lindt. But when the Hershey kisses were offered for FREE! against the Lindt truffle now priced at 14 cents, 69 percent of participants chose the qualitatively less impressive Hershey kisses. They apparently figured that FREE! was a better deal than a 14 cent Lindt truffle despite the fact that the effective price difference was no different than when they had the option of a 15 cent Lindt truffle or a one cent Hershey kiss.

This experiment and many more are discussed in Ariely’s provocative new book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. I enthusiastically recommend Ariely’s book to anyone involved in product pricing in any category. You will likely come away from this read with a better handle on how to price products.

Classical economics has rested on a premise that Ariely shatters to smithereens. For well over two hundred years economists have based their thinking on the premise that marketplace trends are determined by the rational behavior of people acting in their own interests. This in fact is the keystone of Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, the Old Testament of capitalism.

Ariely is not the first to challenge the rational man premise of classical economics. A whole new subfield called behavioral economics has taken root because some brave-minded stalwarts in the dismal science decided the emperor was stark naked. The notion that marketplace trends reflect the outcome of human reasoning in an objectively fathomable world is every bit as illusory as the appearance that the earth is more or less flat.

Michael Mandel, writing in BusinessWeek, says about another book debunking the rational man theory of classical economics, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by Nobel laureate George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller who is well-known for the Case-Shiller Home-price Index:

“The two superstars have produced a truly innovative and bold work that attempts to show how psychological factors explain the origins of the current mess and offer clues for possible solutions. At a time when plummeting confidence is dragging down the market and the economy, the authors' focus on the psychological aspect of economics is incredibly important.”

The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. I would expect to start seeing more accurate economic projections in the future now that such prominent economists as those who wrote the books I’ve cited in this post have revealed just how naked the rational man theory is.

April 23, 2009 in Behavior, Brain, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Trends, Decision processes, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

March 23, 2009

Embracing a New Consciousness

Before Newton made his larger than life mark on history, people in western societies viewed life largely through the lens of a cognitive platform laid down by the Church. Of course its representations of reality were grounded in faith rather than in science. The laity was expected to accept these representations without questioning their validity. But Newtonian science changed that. It altered how people both inside and outside of science cognitively connected to the world. Faith may have remained a major influence in many people’s lives, but reason and logic, however imperfectly executed, came to generally have the larger influence on people’s worldviews.

This has been the case for over three centuries. Never mind that a person is untutored in the ways of science. Faith is not enough for most of us. We still want proof of merit before we vote, buy, or accept someone else’s word about what is true and what is not. It matters little that the proof we accept as golden is often fool’s gold. Our reasoning is not always as fastidious as we would like to believe.

Now, much as happened in the 18th century when an ecclesiastically shaped consciousness gave way to a new consciousness rooted in Newtonian science, a new consciousness is emerging. It is better suited to our times. The diversity, speed and scale of challenges that confront us require a wider field of vision than Newtonian consciousness affords.

As never before, business managers need a consciousness that is more conducive to innovative thinking than Newtonian consciousness is. Newtonian consciousness reflects a bias toward the status quo that can work against finding the best solutions. It favors the tried and proven over the novel and speculative. But ever since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990s, many great breakthroughs in business have flowed from novel and speculative ventures in the marketplace. And many companies have failed to capitalize on opportunities opened up by the Internet because they viewed it through the narrowly focused lens of Newtonian consciousness.

The present tenuous status of many newspapers across the country testifies to the dangers inherent in applying Newtonian consciousness to contemporary challenges. Who would have imagined just a few years back that that a mostly free classified advertising service could so undermine the economic viability of newspapers as craigslist has?

The music industry is another industry whose myopic clinging to the status quo has cost it dearly. In fact, well before the Crash of 2008, countless companies in numerous industries were facing their demise because of continuing to view the world in terms of the past. One study showed that about 20 percent of regional malls were failing.

The truth that many companies have yet to successfully grapple with is that the Internet has deeply and forever changed the rules of marketplace engagement. Everyone has heard by now insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results. But lacking a clear vision of what they face, that is just what many companies are doing. Failing to follow Einstein’s dictum that a problem can’t be solved in the same consciousness in which it was created, they keep applying old ways.

These hapless companies need liberation from Newtonian consciousness. They need a cognitive platform that facilitates innovative thinking, not more ways of applying old solutions to solving problems. In neurological terms, they need a more holistic cognitive platform that integrates the output of left brain (quantitative) and right brain (qualitative) thinking. I refer to this as organic consciousness because it reflects more accurately the natural disposition of the brain to assess matters intuitively (mainly in the right brain) before putting them under the scrutiny of the analytic left brain.

Left brain or Newtonian consciousness discounts the value of qualitative thinking. In so doing, it severely inhibits creativity which relies heavily on intuitive processes. This can prove fatal to a company facing unfamiliar challenges that call for innovative “outside-the-box” thinking. People who view matters through Newtonian consciousness dread going outside the box. They cling to the status quo like a toddler does her blanky.

In my next post I will cite several examples of companies that benefit from organic consciousness and draw clear comparisons between organic consciousness and Newtonian Consciousness.

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March 23, 2009 in Organizational Management | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 15, 2009

Liberating Management from Newtonian Consciousness

There has been little argument about the cause of the 2008 Crash: collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, followed by an implosion of financial markets. But those explanations fall short of accounting fully for what precipitated the worst financial crisis 80 years. A solid case can be made that the root cause of the 2008 Crash lies in how we organize and run our businesses, governments and personal lives.

In negotiating our professional and private we work primarily from a mode of consciousness better suited to the horse and buggy age – perhaps because it originated then. In those days, life unfolded at a slower pace, with less complexity and little change from one year to the next. There was about life a certain mechanistic predictability. The seasons came and went, with little happening to distinguish one year from the next except for experiences that have been part of human life for thousands of years.

The times we now live in are radically different. They unfold at a pace bewildering to a brain that evolved to accommodate a slower moving and less complex world. These sometimes numbingly challenging times call for a consciousness that heeds Einstein’s wise observation that at times problems arise that cannot be solved in the same consciousness that created them.

It is not too much to say that human survival could ultimately depend on our ability to enter a new consciousness, one that liberates the human imagination from old, outdated ways of approaching life’s challenges.

For more than two centuries, we have carried on life mainly as seen through the lens of a consciousness drawn from Newtonian science. This consciousness promotes worldviews that are simple and unambiguous. It is rooted in a materialistic conception of life in which nearly everything that happens has a clear-cut cause whose effects can be anticipated. In this way of looking at the world, what cannot be measured is unworthy of attention. Reality is tangible. Nuance and uncertainty exist only in people’s minds, not in how reality unfolds. There are no surprises in Newton’s clockwork universe. When we fail to anticipate an event it is either because we lacked enough information to anticipate it, or it didn’t matter much to us in the first place.

From falling apples to heavenly bodies hurtling through space, Newton believed all motion in inorganic nature occurs in predictable ways. This has inspired scholars for more than two centuries to seek out the Holy Grail of the social sciences: the equivalent of Newton’s three laws of motion that would make people as predictable as comets. No field of study has been more obsessed in this pursuit than economics.

To this day, Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe still influences those who try to divine the twists and turns of markets But alas, no one has yet discovered the basic laws of economics – or more fundamentally and necessary to the task – the basic laws of human behavior. Lately, however, it seems a growing number of minds are realizing that humans really are unpredictable in any kind of Newtonian sense. We are not stimulus-response organisms whose every act has a direct cause that makes every act predictable. Were it otherwise, free will would be an illusion.

So what drives scholars, analysts and others to strive fruitlessly for over two centuries, doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a testable unified theory of markets? Some wags have joked, “It’s physics envy. Economists want the certainty that physicists can count on.”

But maybe that’s not much of a joke, after all. We often hear in newscasts after a surprisingly bad day in stocks, “Wall Street hates surprises.” There are no surprises in a Newtonian universe. Natural events in the inorganic world are knowable in advance. But think about this: if the same were true on Wall Street, there would be no Wall Street. Stock markets are games of chance; surprise is part of the deal.

So there you have it. Untold numbers of very smart people, some of whom have won Nobel prizes for their brilliant output, devoting professional lifetimes to an unobtainable goal: removal of surprises from scenarios involving human behavior in the marketplace and elsewhere.

We would all be served better were more effort spent in figuring better ways to deal with unpredictable events than is common in business. Companies need to liberate themselves from the constraints of linear Newtonian consciousness. They will stand a better chance of surviving by reorganizing themselves to better cope with emergent events – events that cannot be predicted. Professor Jeffrey Goldstein of Adelphi University’s School of Business defines emergence as "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems." Emergent events seem to come from out of nowhere, sometimes with great disruptive power. They do not appear and unfold in linear Newtonian fashion as a consequence of a singular system of causes.

Take the Internet – the most disruptive emergent event perhaps in all of human history. No one anticipated its awe-striking power to transform virtually every facet of our lives before it began breaking over the shorelines of civilization the world over. When World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee executed the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet in 1990 no one anticipated that by the end of the decade over a billion people would be doing the same thing.

The Internet has led to the failure of countless businesses, reshaped entire industries, and radically changed the rules of marketplace engagement. And yet, many businesses, from the very largest to the smallest, remain ill-prepared to survive the effects the Internet is having on their business models and in industries. These companies are frozen in their tracks by the bias of Newtonian consciousness toward the status quo – toward always returning to the way things were successfully done in the past.

Next: Embracing a New consciousness

March 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

February 17, 2009

The Case Against Newtonian Consciousness

The remarkable story of her own stroke told by Jill Bolte Taylor at a TED conference helps us better understand the global shift taking place in human consciousness. Her story provides a rare, even possibly never before seen view into the workings of the human brain. If you haven’t watched this extraordinary video and can spare 18 minutes click through to the TED site now. Then come back to this post and read on.

As difficult as it may be to imagine how it might have been different in the past, human consciousness today is not the same as it has always been. By human consciousness I’m referring to the cognitive framework and processes that guide our conscious mental activities. How we see reality is as much influenced by how our minds and brains work as by what stimulates them into action. Jill Taylor’s story poignantly supports this observation.

The reality she perceived when a massive hemorrhagic stroke shut down her left brain was different from any she had ever before experienced. In describing the change in her perception of reality, she wrote in her book My Stroke of Insight, “… my perception was released from its attachment to categorization and detail … In the absence of my left hemisphere’s analytical judgment, I was completely entranced by feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience. .. .I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call Nirvana.”

Taylor’s story brings to mind the oft-expressed idea that “perception is reality.” Yet, how many of us really believe that – especially with respect to our own perceptions of reality. Most of us would argue that there is an objective reality regardless of how individual minds may distort it. The tree that falls in the woods does make a sound regardless of whether it is within the reach of a human ear.

In classical Newtonian science, objective existence is independent of human perception. Nothing has so influenced the worldviews of common folk as Newtonian science. Never mind that most of us are untutored in science. When we make our decisions we still think, however imperfectly, like scientists seeking proof of a proposition before accepting it as truth. The ultimate proof of truth is established when different experimenters, using the same methods, get the same outcome.

Newtonian science dramatically transformed human consciousness. Before Newton’s reduction of motion in nature to three basic laws, the Church commanded the greatest influence on how people saw the world. Under the Church, faith, not objective proof, was the foundation of content in most minds. Newtonian science changed that. It offered a more secure platform for determining truth because unlike propositions rooted in faith, propositions rooted in science can be quantitatively assayed.

Philosophers around Newton’s times coveted the certainties obtainable through a platform of Newtonian consciousness. If all events in nature can be expressed in cause-and-effect equations, why cannot human behavior be so parsed? Much of the intellectual agenda during the Age of Reason revolved around the idea that as products of nature humans are subject to the same laws as inorganic nature. Belief in this idea led to the foundation of economics, and ultimately to Adam Smith’s ideas about how markets work in a capitalistic society. Indeed all the social sciences, including economics are descended directly from Newtonian science.

Lately, however, the value of Newtonian consciousness is undergoing sharp questioning. This is in some sense an ironic turn of events given how physicists and engineers came out of their ivory towers armed with massive computer power promising near fail-safe predictions of investment markets.

A recent article in BusinessWeek, which placed much of the blame for the 2008 Crash on exotic software applications that were supposedly superior in judgment to human beings, wryly observed, “With any luck, the physicists and engineers who flocked to trading floors in recent years will head back to science labs to create things.”

Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott, experts in financial modeling, took measure of the limitations of Newtonian consciousness in predicting outcomes in financial markets in another BusinessWeek article:

“The complex financial models that got us into this mess too often mask human nature behind false limitations of risk…

“As modelers, we see the fantasy of perfection as the fatal flaw seducing both developers and users. The invisible worm of financial modeling is a dark love of theoretical elegance and excessive precision…

“There are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them. Financial theories written in mathematical notation—aka models—imply a false sense of precision. Good modelers know that.”

There you have it. The emperor has no clothes. Two prominent modelers and authors of several books on the subject have revealed some of the most serious limitations of Newtonian consciousness, limitations that played a huge role in precipitating the biggest financial crisis in 70 years. We recommend reading more of their observations.

Albert Einstein famously said, “A problem cannot be solved by the same consciousness that created it.” Following his counsel, a more advanced cognitive platform than Newtonian consciousness is required to save the day as it were. Even before the global financial crash of 2008 companies the world over were trying to get a clearer vision of what lies ahead than Newtonian consciousness can render. The mechanistic and linear cause-cause-and-effect constructs of Newtonian consciousness are too simplistic for taking on the challenges in operating environments that are so filled with paradoxes, ambiguities, uncertainties and ephemeral conditions as they are now.

Next: Liberating Management from Newtonian Consciousness

February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

January 31, 2009

A Global Shift in Human Consciousness That Will Affect Us All

This being the last day of the first month of this year, with no postings thus far in January, I started this day feeling a bit guilty for giving my devoted readers so little to chew on in recent months. Google is going to find out about this and demote me. Currently Google gives Ageless Marketing a 6/10 ranking which is pretty good. But I must do more postings to keep from slipping into a ranking of “who cares?”

In my own defense I spent the last quarter of 2008 dealing with a bit of a health issue. It’s still with me, but I’m truckin’ on.

I have been working on a white paper for a client in south Africa, elements of which I plan to share with my readers. The white paper makes a case that an epochal change is taking place on a global scale in human consciousness. It has inspired a number of recent books, countless articles and significant changes in some large, important companies.

This new consciousness is also reflected in the perspective that Barack Obama has brought to the political stage.

One of the observations I make in the white paper is that the U.S. automobile industry is beyond salvation. This is not a new view in this space. I ran a post three years ago authored by auto industry expert John Keilly who was quite pessimistic about the future of the U.S. auto industry. The U.S. auto industry is beyond saving in my view because it seeks the solutions it needs to survive from the vantage point of a consciousness that is not able to render a clear picture of either the challenges to its existence or what is necessary to surmount those challenges.

At first, talking about transitioning from one consciousness to another may sound New Agey. However, the white paper describes the emergent shift in consciousness from a historical perspective, beginning with society-wide change in consciousness catalyzed by the Gutenberg movable type press, then the huge shift fomented by the emergence of Newtonian science and finally the one we’re entering now that is rooted in quantum science.

The new consciousness, which I have termed quantum consciousness, is being catalyzed by three major forces. First, the aging of industrial societies, which is producing a more seasoned, experienced group mind that is taking us from an ethos that is strongly egocentric to one that is more “We” oriented. Second, the group mind, as it were, that is developing from and on the Internet. Third, remarkable developments in brain science that are giving a new and much expanded understanding of how the physical brain and intangible mind depend on each other and work together.

A good place to start in this new thread is by viewing an extraordinary account of a stroke by a brain scientist who experienced the stroke. Some of my readers have no doubt see the videoed account but it’s still worthwhile seeing again. I will begin my next post with a discussion of the deeper meanings of what the brain scientist who experienced the stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor, shares with us.

January 31, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

December 31, 2008

Season's Greetings from the World’s Largest Plant

(This is a reprint of an essay I have run before, usually at this time of year. As we leave the Winter Holiday Season and head off into a new year, I think this essay has special significance for what we face in 2009. The year is beginning amid the most unsettled conditions in generations. Many are predicting further decline in equity markets and consumer confidence is at its lowest recorded level. Despite those and other dark clouds on the horizon, signs are beginning to appear indicating that the worst of the 2008 Crash is behind us. But turning things around will take a lot of effort at all levels of government and business, as well as in our every day lives. All are connected. No sector of society stands apart from any other sector. This essay presents a metaphorical look at why we really have no other rational choice than to pull together regardless of our place in society or our political label if we are to quickly recover from the ravages of 2008.)

Several years ago a great discovery was announced. The largest known plant in the world had been found in Michigan. It was a single mushroom plant covering more than 100 acres.

Today’s middle-aged PCG presents marketers with an extraordinary challenge: weaving the themes of midlife values into messages for the young in ways that feel comfortable and cool to them.

May 2009 unfold for you one an all as a truly great year!

December 31, 2008 in Consumer Behavior, Consumer Trends, Demographics, Economy, Human Development, Marketing, Millenials, Generation Y | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

December 18, 2008

How Japanese Marketers Aim to Increase Sales in Older Markets by Changing Human Nature

While America’s economic wizards try to figure out how to extricate us from the worst economic downturn in seventy years, their Japanese counterparts are trying to change human nature in an attempt to restore vigorous health to the Japanese economy.

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a push is on in Japan to reverse the buying behavior of “elder boys.” For a dozen consecutive years Japanese department store sales have fallen. Population shrinkage among the under-50 crowd is the reason.

To counter the negative effects of this demographic trend, Japanese business is looking to older people, especially men. The hope is that elders can be persuaded to return to return to the narcissistic and materialistically grounded behaviors of youth that cause cash registers to ring.

One can safely assume that sooner or later marketers in the U.S will pursue a similar strategy. But it work any better here than it will in Japan. Proponents of such a strategy appear totally unmindful of decades of research in adult development showing that the later life shift away from narcissistic and materialistic behaviors is developmental. It is a natural consequence of growing out of the years when focus on self and on materialistic metaphors of one’s self-image is important to social and vocational success.

Older people frequently complain about all the “stuff” in their lives. Later life is welcomed by many as a time for simplicity. It is also a time when self-centeredness typically gives way to others-centeredness.

Washington Post article on an amusing example of how many – shall we dare to say most? – marketers see older markets through the lens of their own worldviews rather than in terms of the older person’s worldview.

Seen through my eyes, most marketing to older people appears to be created by people who think of an older person as mainly an older version of their younger selves. However, that older person is likely so different from his or her younger self that they find it difficult to relate to the values of youth -- or even remember how much they once embraced them.

Those Japanese marketers are not likely to reverse the developmental changes that take place in the later years. Their efforts will be more fruitfully pursued in search of later life needs that can be more profitably catered to.

December 18, 2008 in Advertising, Aging, Consumer Behavior, Consumer Trends, Demographics, Human Development, Marketing | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

October 20, 2008

The Roots of My Optimism

Nature endowed our frontal lobes with the ability to look beyond the present moment into time ahead. However the farther cognitively removed we are from the present, the more likely our predictions about the future will prove wrong. This is especially true when some disruptive event explodes in our midst to nullify our customary way of seeing things. The printing press did this over five centuries ago. The Internet did this less than two decades ago.

The Internet has altered in measurable ways virtually every aspect of human life. It has radically changed how business operates. Even the most astute science fiction writer could not have anticipated the magnitude of the Internet on business. For instance who in 1990 would have predicted the emergence of a new business model in which company’s most important consumer products are free – such as they are on craigslist.com, Google and an assortment of social media sites.

Ponder how Amazon’s has transformed the book selling business. Think about Wikipedia’s radical disruption of the encyclopedia business. Overnight, a $1,400 set of Encyclopedia Britannica lost virtually all its value to most people. Free Wikipedia was not only a hundred times larger, but according to a study by the British journal Nature, just about as accurate.

Customers talking to each other reveal the pros and cons of products and companies on a daily basis. People now trade stocks on line at a fraction of the cost in pre-Internet times. Homebuyers go around the close-knit, incestuous Realtor ® community in search for new homes. Thanks to Skype and other voice over Internet protocols, you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world without a long distance charge.

The list of technological, economic, social and cultural disruptions in our lives due to the Internet since 1990 or so is astonishingly long. But, the Internet is only one source of life-changing, world-changing disruptive forces that are radically changing the human experience in virtually every way conceivable.

An aging population is radically changing the dynamics of supply and demand. With most adults now over 45, big houses, full closets and years of materialistic fulfillment are resulting in falling per capita spending in dozens of categories. Exacerbating this trend is the shrinking number of people under 45 in developed nations around the world – the result of over 35 years of too few births annually to replace the population.

Advancements in science in portend enormous disruptions – many for the betterment of the human condition. For example, genomic and medical research has caused scientists to cautiously predict the end of diabetes, many cancers (if not all) and a long list of inherited diseases like Huntington’s.

Even the dismal science is seeing benign disruptive developments. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his work in using microloans to bail millions of families out of abject poverty has plans that he claims will eliminate poverty worldwide by 2025 – just 13 years from now. This from a man thought by traditional bankers to be more than a bit unrealistic when he proposed to them using microloans to life people out of poverty. Microlending for this purpose has now become a sizeable industry.

Think back 14 years to 1994 and reflect on all of the unpredicted breakthroughs that have occurred in field after field. The Internet browser, Netscape appeared in 1994. When asked his opinion of its importance, Bill Gates replied, “It’s a trivial thing.” Yet, the browser transformed the world in ways that no other communications artifact ever has.

Also in 1994, teams at the University of Innsbruck and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology executed the first successful teleportation task. Granted, their accomplishment was far from the impressive actions of Scottie’s teleportation device aboard the Starship Enterprise. But it still was enough even at the quantum scale to confirm its possibility (though I wouldn’t recommending shorting airline stocks just yet.

And here’s another Starship Enterprise technology just beginning to emerge: remember the replicator that Enterprise crew members used to make ham and cheese sandwiches from assorted atoms and molecules? A primitive semblance of the enterprise’s replicator has reached the marketplace in the past decade – only it’s called a “3-d fax machine.” It is yet to reproduce the organic stuff in a ham and cheese sandwich, but

We are in a period of bifurcation – a “crossroads between death and transformation,” as Margaret Wheatley says, when a system is at maximum instability. The Soviet Union entered a state of bifurcation in 1985, fated to reach maximum instability in 1990 and collapse into separate states in 1991. Many in the U.S. smirked and proclaimed absolute victory over socialism. Yet today, the U.S. economic system has been massively disrupted by actions of the most doctrinaire conservative administration in U.S. history. Several weeks ago it blinked during a moment of “maximum instability” and nationalized much of America’s leading financial organizations.

Living through times like these is a scary, and for many, a deeply painful experience. In such moments it is hard to see far beyond the present. Yet, I am full of optimism about the future. I feel throughout my entire being the winds of change that are blowing away the detritus of worn-out ideas and ways of managing our governments, our companies and indeed our own lives. Once more, as Tom Stoppard reminds us in his play Arcadia, “The future is disorder. A door like this has opened up five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you k new is wrong.”

The political, economic, cultural storms we are living through are precedent to the most extraordinary age of comfort and plenty in the history of humankind. Deconstruction has always preceded reconstruction in the long journey of human progress from the days of the first hand-wrought tools.

October 20, 2008 in Consumer Trends, Demographics, Economic Trends, Economy, Marketing, Technology | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

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