Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

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.

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.

 

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."