Ageless Marketing

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

It’s 1921 in London. Everyone is talking about the new strange behavior of blue tits. All of a sudden the azure blue crowned scourge of aphids has taken to prying off paper tops from milk bottles waiting to be taken in from stoops all across the city. They then sip the milk down as far as their short beaks permit before moving on to the next bottle.

Soon, blue tits across the entire country are doing the same. Within months,  all over Europe blue tits follow suit. The wave of behavioral change among blue tits has happened so quickly that ornithologists are flummoxed.  They say not enough time has passed to attribute this new blue tit behavior to imitation.

Years later, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake thinks he as the answer to the mystery: the blue tits were influenced by information emanating from the morphic field to which they are connected. According to Sheldrake, a morphic field is a reservoir of  memories collectively shared by a community of organisms that inform its members how to carry out various tasks.

A morphic field is somewhat equivalent to Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. In Jungian thought, some action that you take that you attribute to your “instincts” may actually be rooted in the reservoir of collective memories formed by the experiences of your fellow humans over many centuries or millennia reaching back to the most ancient times of life on earth.

A cousin idea of Jung’s collective unconscious is French social theorist Émile Durkheim’s collective conscious. He used the term in referring to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. There is more intentional participation in the collective conscious than in the Jungian collective unconscious.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell tried to reduce sudden shifts in mass behavior to the intentional behavior of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. However, Gladwell’s rationally grounded explanations socially pervasive behavior have not only been challenged by many scientists, they do not take into account the je ne sais quoi - a certain inexplicable something - that enables the Gladwellian triad of influencers to get the ball rolling toward a tipping point.

Based on frequent polling of my audiences The Tipping Point has been highly popular among marketers. However, as much as marketers might wish otherwise, it fails to acknowledge the uncertainties and discontinuities that are just as much present in human behavior as they are in the behavior of electrons and photons.

The truth that consumer researchers and marketers continue to ignore is that, some aspects of customer behavior are unlikely to ever be accounted for in a fashion that can satisfy the rigors demands of scientific analysis and lead to constant predictability.  This indeed must be the case; otherwise that which we call free is just an illusion.

Einstein famously observed, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”  What one of history’s greatest analytical, rational minds was saying is that some truths transcend rational explanation.

In the end, the zeitgeist of an era resists quantification. How can any of us know what unsensed forces  bear on our outlooks and behavior? But whatever their foundation, and how ever they resist rational explanation, the unconscious influences of zeitgeist are real -- unconscious being the key word here.

Neuroscientists tell us that 95 percent of the mental activity involved in forming our perceptions, thinking and ultimately our decisions occurs outside the realms of consciousness. In those consciously inaccessible zones, the zeitgeist subtly colors our worldview.

I have written quite a lot over time in this space about unconscious influences on marketplace. Some postings have dealt with what I call the psychological center of gravity hypothesis. You can read more about the PCG Hypothesis at here, here and here.

The point worthy of stressing here, is that companies most likely to thrive and survive in then challenging times we face will be those that either intuitively or intentionally connect the dots between the zeitgeist, Jung’s collective unconscious, Durkheim’s collective conscious or Sheldrake’s morphic fields.

Next: How Millennials reflect the influence of the zeitgeist 

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

Comments

[Shama Hyder]

No quantifying? Enough to drive the world mad-except it doesn't. = )

[Rabon]

The hundredth monkey strikes again. Thank you for writing about such interesting confluences. I think one of the ills of civilization is the rigid departmentalization of universities. And thank you for the beautifully poetic comments you’ve left at my electronic doorstep.

Anyway, somewhere I read the Greeks were consciously unconscious while modern man is unconsciously conscious. And I wonder if one would be any more predictable than the other, even if the predictor was either.

[Atare E. Agbamu]

David, how do we distinguish the real "spirit of the times" from the Madison-Avenue-enabled variety in the service of some product or service?

[David Wolfe]

Atare,

The one word answer to your question: AUTHENTICITY.

Dove's recent "Real Beauty" campaign accurately reflects an affect of the contemporary zeitgeist that marketers should heed: desire for projecting reality in advertising in contrast to the empty idealizations of advertising in the past when youth, who are drawn to idealizations, were in the marketplace majority.