Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

The Foundations of a New Marketing Paradigm (Part 3)

How Bridget Chose Self-delusion over Self-Realization

I once met a woman named Bridget who proudly told me how in her early 40s, after years of letting life happen to her, she took control of her life to make it for her. The first thing she said she did was to throw her husband out.

Quite excitedly, Bridget told me how she successfully worked through issues that had long kept her from becoming the person she wanted to be. As she added more detail to her story I interjected, “Isn’t it wonderful that in midlife some inner voice begins prompting us to reexamine our lives.” She exploded, “There was no inner voice. I did it all myself! Don’t take anything away from me!”

I had unwittingly injured Bridget’s sense of autonomy. She vehemently rejected any idea that developmental forces might be at the root of her decision to “take control of her life.” Her reaction is not unusual. We readily acknowledge developmental forces in children’s behavior, but it’s not easy to recognize them at work our own.

Personality development is a lifelong journey marked by milestones. These milestones generally appear in behavior at generally predictable times and in generally predictable ways. Bridget was not unique despite her ego’s contrary position.

Typically in early in midlife, inchoate forces emanating from our genes launch us on the way to what Carl Jung called self-realization. As he saw it, the principal task of the second half of life is to pick up at a higher level the perennial adolescent question, “Who am I,” in quest of the real self and its purpose in being.

Throughout the first half of life, our personas  – Latin for "mask," and so named by Jung – play a heavy role in our interactions with others. This interferes with having a picture of our real selves. Thus it is, that in the second half of life according to Jung, we begin dissolving the persona to clear away the foggy perceptions we have of ourselves. That is the self-realization process.

Personal development milestones anticipated in our genetic makeup predispose – not predetermine – the general character of our worldviews, needs, motivations and how we seek satisfaction of needs. While many details of our lives may be shaped by conscious will, the roots of behavior are planted outside the direct access of the conscious mind.

With no apparent knowledge of empirically derived tenets of human development in the adult years, Bridget saw nothing other than her own will involved in her personal makeover. So, she adopted a confabulated reality on the issue. She had no place in her mind for the words of famed neurologist Richard Restak, on whose work PBS’s award-winning series The Brain and The Mind were based:

“We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives and other mental activities may be possible.”

Brain scientist Bernard J. Baars puts the matter this way in his book, In the Theater of Consciousness: 

“Our inability to accurately report intentions and expectations may simply reflect the fact that they are qualitatively not conscious.”

Several years ago while discussing the unconscious roots of behavior at a sales training workshop, a woman suddenly jumped up from her seat and yelled at me, “Mr. Wolfe, you may not know why you do what you do, but I know why I do everything I do and it’s not because of some inner voices that my mind doesn’t know are there.”

Contemporary brain research has told us otherwise. The “inner voices” that our conscious minds can’t hear are legion. They stealthfully prompt our conscious minds to reflect on process issues toward decisions that benefit us. Of course, not all of our decisions turn out to be the best ones for any number of reasons.

The unconscious cues that catalyze our behavior are influenced by our changing needs across a lifetime. Teens are prompted towards behavior that favors their socialization. Bridget was prompted toward behavior that favored self-realization – the discovery of the true self, stripped of the persona of youth.

The urge to reexamine our lives when they are approximately half done is an important part of what defines us as humans. It marks a shift from the self-centeredness of youth to the others-centeredness that inclines people in their middle years to start “giving back.”

My prediction about the coming of the Age of Aquarius II nearly 20 years ago in Serving the Ageless Market (see previous post) could have been made as early as 1994. That is when decline in the U.S. fertility rate fell below population replacement rates. This meant that no cohort was in following boomers would be large enough to hold back a massive change in the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – that reflected the characteristic worldviews of midlife.

By worldview, I mean how one connects to the world beyond one’s skin, not necessarily what one believes. Children connect to the world differently than teens do, teens differently than young adults, young adults than middle age adults, and so on.

 My prediction that an unprecedented wave of “giving back” lay ahead was based on simple demographic arithmetic with a psychographic overlay. Shortly after the turn of the century 11 years ahead, boomers would makeup 90 percent of the midlife population. They would far outnumber adults between the ages of 18 and 39. Today the ratio of middle age and older adults to younger adults is 136 million to 86 million. is 136 million

By the sheer weight of their numbers, the older population, led by aging boomers, would inevitably shift the zeitgeist toward the worldviews and values long attributed to the middle years and beyond by students of adult development.

Next: How the seasons of life shape our needs and how we seek their satisfaction.

The Foundations of a New Marketing Paradigm (Part 2)

The Coming of the Age of Aquarius II

Who would not jump at the chance to know the mind of the market for an age cohort, or even more broadly, the market at-large, twenty years into the future?

Pushing aside concern about sounding immodest, I framed the mind of today’s boomer market nearly 20 years ago. I did so in my book Serving the Ageless Marke (McGraw-Hill 1990). Subsequent to that, I predicted that the behavior of consumers in virtually every age group would be influenced in major ways by the worldviews, values and behaviors that are characteristic of aging boomers today.

My predictions in 1989 about how boomers would handle their own aging sharply conflicted with what was then conventional thinking. With some editing for brevity and clarity, here is a sampling of what I wrote then:

Many observers are predicting that in later life boomers will be frozen in a kind of adolescent stage of self-absorption. Widely quoted gerontologist, Ken Dychtwald, 39, said in an Advertising Age interview, "There is every indication that most generations grow up and out of the 'me generation.' Boomers don't."

Like a reformed scarlet lady, boomers are finding it hard to live down their "me first" reputation. That’s because current perceptions of boomers are largely fashioned from perceptions of boomers formed in their adolescence and early adulthood. No allowance is made for personal growth into higher levels of maturity. “Many “experts” predict a dark and selfish old age for boomers. No generation in history will be as filled with angst about aging as boomers will be.

The idea that boomers in the early years of midlife don't like the idea of "old age" is not unique. It happens that way in every generation. But people generally get beyond their midlife anxieties about age as the years pass.

Most boomers are not destined to experience relentless regret over spent youth in their later years. Predictions to the contrary fly in the face of a large body of research into adult psychological development, and deny the work of such luminaries in adult development as Carl Jung, Erik Erikson and Abraham Maslow.

My discussion covered boomers’ outlook and behavior as they transitioned from the rebellious years of youth into the early adult years, and from there their entry into early midlife, which the first boomers entered in 1986:

Fifteen to twenty years ago, the older of the boomers trimmed their hair, shaved their beards, removed their funny jewelry, and put their bras back on and joined the establishment to fulfill the urges of the first experiential lifestyle stage of adulthood – the Possession Experience years. Many succeeded beyond their expectations, dissolving their earlier views about the evils of materialism. In pursuit of materialistic indulgence, they jettisoned their idealized images of what life ought to be. They now set about making money in less than idealized jobs working for less than idealized companies to begin the accumulation stage of their lives..

But now, as boomers troop into the middle years, many are revisiting the idealized views life they had in their late adolescence and early adulthood. They have begun asking themselves perennial midlife questions such as, "Is this all there is,” and “what is the meaning of my life” and “how will I be remembered?”

I then described a new era that echoed the themes of love, light and humanity boomers lumped under the heading the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s:

My roster of clients includes an impressive array of children of Aquarius who are re-visiting the ideals of their youthful selves with as high a sense of mission as they had in the tumultuous 60s and 70s. This time, however, they have greater wisdom and financial wherewithal to more successful.

The same generation that generated great upheaval in traditions in the 1960s and 70s is now leading us into a neotraditional movement. Boomers are taking us back to "basics" after they led society away from them in the Age of Aquarius I. We are now in the beginning stages of its sequel: The Age of Aquarius II, which turns much of what once was put down as “New Age” nonsense into mainstream convention.

The New Age movement is not a fad that boomers will grow out of. It is an approach to life that many will get into deeper as they age. Optimal marketing success in aging boomer markets depends on understanding this.

New Age thinking revolves around the idea that all things are of a piece, that no one thing is separate from all other things. This imposes on us an obligation to regard our place and time on earth as an office to be filled with a sense of responsibility to all life and the planet we live on.

I asked Nancy Peppard, 39, about what Boomers are going to be like in the future as members of the maturity market. Peppard is both a boomer and a gerontologist. She sees boomers moving in a direction that portends major changes in public policy and in the design, marketing and rendering of products and services.

First, she talks about where older boomers are today in their minds: "I find lot of people in my age range going through what I have been going through. We are beginning to look outside ourselves for meaning in life." Maslow would understand that. It's the direction taken by adults in middle age in every generation.

"I think New Age thinking is something marketers interested in older markets need to take a long look at. I don't mean the Shirley McLaine kind of thing. The so-called New Age movement of today began 20 years ago. Unlike other fads that youth cultures embrace today and reject tomorrow, the New Age philosophy has become part of our culture and it has grown with time. In both subtle and overt ways it now affects many facets of our daily lives.

"Within certain segments of the medical community, for example, the effect of New Age thinking is being felt. Specialties such as homeopathy, a holistic preventative approach to health care, and psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the direct relationship between the mind and the body, are growing in respectability and visibility."

Peppard cites as one example of sensitive concern about all life the growing number of restaurants that now serve "non-stressed" beef and chicken, animals grown in stress-free environments. Socially responsible investment funds and credit cards that contribute a percentage of their profits to causes are other examples of business response to the greater sense of the cosmic connectedness that is common among leading edge Boomers.

From Peppard's point of view, boomers are projecting unique behavior. In some regards, I agree with her, but in a larger sense, boomers are not unique. They traveling the same path toward maturation that people in midlife have done for millennia. In comparisons with previous generations, boomers are unique mainly in the opportunities they have for developing themselves toward the Maslovian goal in later life of "being all you can be."

Next: How it was possible to know the mind of the market today, 20 years ago.

The Foundations of a New Marketing Paradigm (Part 1)

The Most Influential Force on Consumer Behavior

This post begins a series that describe the legacy I would like to leave behind with the hope that it would eventually gain serious traction in marketing. By many accounts, marketing is facing its greatest crisis ever. Many attribute this to the Internet. Certainly the Internet has played a major role in marketing’s current travails. However, like a beautiful lake whose waters have receded to reveal an ugly bottom filled with detritus of a thousand types, the Internet has revealed a host of problems that have long existed below the placid surface.

No category of business expense contains as much waste as consumer research and marketing. The amounts are astonishing. Raj Sisodia, my coauthor of Firms of Endearment figured that companies spend about $11,000 each year trying to get sales from his family of five.

In all, marketing related activities cost companies about $500 billion annually. Just on intuition, I'd speculate that figure is double what it should be. That claim is not as outlandish as it might seem. Starbucks became an international brand without advertising expenditures, the single biggest expense in many companies' marketing budgets.

Marketing is economically inefficient because it operates more as a game of chance than as a scientifically well-grounded discipline. Few would submit to a surgeon’s knife, cross a bridge or get on an airplane if medical, engineering and flying professionals who approached their roles as though playing games of chance.

Think of the children’s game, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and you have a good idea how blindly the profession of marketing is acted out.

The biggest – and to me the most obvious flaw in marketing is the pervasive impoverishment of knowledge of the fundamentals of human behavior. As I’ve said before in this space, an MBA candidate can get an MBA in marketing without taking a single course in human behavior. The currency of marketing is expressed in numbers, not tenets of behavior.

That flabbergasts friends who are not in marketing. They cannot imagine marketing being anything other than the applied application of behavior science in a business context.

To the degree that students delve into behavioral science in business schools, their efforts are directed more to social psychology than to other, potentially more fruitful branches of mind science.

Social psychology, as presented to business school students, deals primarily with the interactive influences of people on each other. Other things get stirred into the broth, but academics look at consumer behavior through the lens of social interaction.

On its face, social psychology seems like it is a worthy platform offering in depth understanding of consumers’ behavior. However, two factors seriously limit its value in marketing.

First, social psychology heavily relies on self-reports by research subjects. The dubiousness of this is reflected in high failure rates among marketing campaigns that rely on consumers’ self-reports. New product failure rates reach 90 percent according to some studies.

The cost of failed product introductions is staggering. One study revealed that each year, retail grocery stores spend an average $956,800 per store to introduce new products that will fail.

Recent brain research supports what cognitive scientists have been telling us all along: people don’t know their own minds very well. Brain scans indicate that as much as 95 percent of the mental activity underlying our perceptions, thoughts and decisions takes place outside the cognitive reach of our conscious minds. But because we tend to get uncomfortable if we don’t have a picture in our conscious mind that makes sense and seems real, we often construct images in our minds of a faux reality just to feel better.

People vary enormously in how much congruence they achieve between images of apparent reality in the conscious mind and images of true reality in the deeper reaches of the brain. The degree of congruence depends on many factors – which brings us to the second shortcoming of social psychology as applied to consumer research and marketing activities.

Social psychology as applied in consumer research and marketing is contextually deficient. It’s primary context is social – hence its name. However, human behavior at its core is not social. It’s personal – primitively personal. All behavior begins with conatus – the natural tendency of a body to seek persistence of its life and to develop itself to its maximum potential expression of self.

In an earlier post, I described conatus as the "most influential force in consumer behavior." If that is true, then it should be the most influential tenet of behavior in consumer research and marketing.

Conatus is the driving force of self-preservation behavior. It is not an expression of social forces, but like the sex drive, is an expression of our genes activated by proteins formation on behalf of individual and species survival.

Lest that sound too reductionist, I should quickly add that social forces do influence how we respond to the self-preservation imperatives that lie at the roots of all our behavior. So, indeed, the romance is real and the love that others have for us does influence how we express the imperatives of conatus in our lives.

Marketers tend to be distracted by undue focus on social influences on consumer behavior. By tradition, marketing excludes attention to the primitive and more powerful forces of conatus. However, it is not possible to fully understand even the nature of social influences on consume behavior without grasping the basics of conatus.

I will explain why an understanding of conatus leads to more effective marketing in my next post in this series. I will support the explanation by recalling predictions I made 20 years about consumer behavior decades into the future in my book, Serving the Ageless Market, and show how I was able to do that as this series unfolds.

The Largest Movement in the World (That Almost No One Saw Coming)

I apologize for the two-week hiatus. I took an unplanned 5-day vacation at INOVA’s Fair Oaks Hospital near my home in Reston, Virginia last week.

I’m fine, now, so there’s no cause for concern. All in all, the experience was more enjoyable than not. The customer (patient) experience was terrific and I got a ton of reading done, including Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest.  Hawken’s take on a massive social transformation of government and business is eye-popping. This is hinted in the book’s subtitle, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming.

Hawken takes the reader on a journey through time, starting out many centuries ago, to show how we got to where we are today in terms of how we are dealing with major societal problems, such as the beleaguered state of our natural environments.

At times a reader might wonder why Hawken pauses in the journey he takes us on to talk about life centuries ago. However, in the end he pulls together threads harvested from multiple spools of thought into a beautifully fashioned literary tapestry depicting humankind’s present situation on this planet.

The explosion of interest by companies the world over in addressing many issues we’ve become accustomed to government taking a lead in seeking solutions to is staggering. These issues include environmental problems and a host of social causes ranging from severe poverty and education to health and medical challenges in Third World nations.

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 63 are countries. The other 37 are companies. The combined annual turnover of the 10 largest companies in the world exceeds the GDP of most countries. At the present pace of corporate wealth building, it will not be long before capitalistic enterprises make up the majority of economic entities.

Like politicians and – yes, marketers – denizens of the corporate enterprise universe have not ranked very high in public polls that ask people about their levels of trust and respect for those in government and business who serve them. Marketers have been ranked just a notch above used car salesmen in some polls.

In a recent Gallop poll, 7 in 10 people said they did not trust CEOs of large companies, and nearly 8 in 10 believe that top executives will take improper actions to help themselves at the expense of their companies. In less than a year following 9/11, the number of Americans who see big corporations as an actual threat to America’s future doubled to 38%.

I see a different picture of the role of business enterprise in America’s – and indeed, the future of all humankind. We talk about this picture in Firms of Endearment, of which I am co-author. It seems obvious that people are hungry for a more optimistic image of business judging by the sales record of Firms of Endearment. Released just in February, it is already in its third printing and will soon be out in both Chinese and Italian versions.

Paul Hawken’s optimism about the path being taken toward a better world by a rapidly growing body of business enterprises is similar to our own. While Firms of Endearment gets down to the nitty-gritty of specific companies that take a broader view of their role in making the world a better place, Blessed Unrest works from a different perspective. It provides a 40,000 foot view of the greatest social transformation in the theory and practice of business since Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776. The view from 40,000 feet is truly breathtaking.

As he went to work on the book, Hawken estimated that there were some 100,000 organizations including NGOs (non-governmental eleemosynary organizations) as well as entities that operate more like profit-making enterprises but with a defined social purpose. Mohamed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank that issues micro business loans to the poor in developing nations won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful capitalistic approach to reducing severe poverty.

Hawken’s research revealed that the number of quasi-public and business entities dedicated to “saving the planet” and elevating life quality for people everywhere runs at least to a million, and perhaps to as much as 2 million organizations.

I do not agree with everything Hawken posits in Blessed Unrest, but that doesn’t detract from my opinion that this is one of the most important reads I’ve had in my hands for sometime. Without the benefit of many insights Hawken delivers to us in Blessed Unrest, you will be groping toward the future through a fog of misperceptions wafting up from old, outdated paradigms.

This is a critical fact: The future cannot be predicted by what has happened in the past. We have entered a discontinuous state in which is replacing a several centuries-old obsessive focus on the individual with a more holistic focus on human survival. As I see it, in this scenario, private organizations of every description in alliances with business enterprises – not government – represent the last best hope for our survival. You’ll understand better why that is when you read Blessed Unrest.
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In my next post I will resume the thread about the legacy I would like to leave to my core profession, marketing.