Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

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.

 

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?

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.