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.

Comments

[Personalised Flash Drive]

great post and such interesting perspectives

[marketing mix]

Long post, but worth the read, great green information, thanks, keep up the good stuff!

[marketing mix]

Long post, but worth the read, great green information, thanks, keep up the good stuff!

[Marketer]

I find all your post really usefull! I love to read them. Thank you so much for great informations!