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The Left Brain's Antagonism to New Information Challenging its Existing Models of Reality

Reader Pat Jennings wrote, “Are you familiar with the book "Neuromarketing" by Renvoise and Morin? It is a great book for learning how to market to the "old brain." I decided to check the book out and, as I often do, got distracted and ended up reading an article in The New Scientist about the recent debacle over Gap’s experience in crowd sourced logo design.

In case you missed the story, Gap recently got burned when it abandoned its traditional logo in favor of one produced by crowd sourcing. Public response to the new logo reminded me of the New Coke fiasco in 1985 when the Coca-Cola Company brought the iconic drink out in a new formula.

The New Scientist article reported research by the neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus explaining the broad rejection by consumers of the new logo. Without weighing on the merits of the research, I was struck by the number of comments posted by readers of the article that dismissively charged NeuroFocus with practicing “pseudo science.”  

In a new book I’m writing I describe how the left hemisphere of the brain – the primary site of reasoning – is biased against new information that does not conform to its existing models of reality. It is inclined to either reconform the information to fit with what it currently holds to be true or reflexively reject it out of hand. This rejection is often sarcastically disdained as when a person writes off an empirically derived conclusion with the charge, “It’s pseudoscience.”

Over the past several months we’ve been reminded numerous times that this is the 50^th anniversary of the start of Jane Goodall’s epochal research into the world of chimpanzees. When she discovered that chimps made and used tools the left brains of scientists the world over roundly rejected her claim. Goodall’s lack of a university education didn’t help her standing. Yet she had challenged the most fundamental difference claimed by science to separate man and lower animals. Today, of course, tool makers and users are known to exist throughout the animal kingdom.

We are passing through times of unprecedented speed and scale of change that are upending our view of the world across the full spectrum of reality. Once again I'm reminded of the words of the character Valentine in Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia when reflecting on this fact:

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.

Advances in neuroscience over the three decades that 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 is 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 many traditional ideas in marketing.

In his 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 sources of handicaps that older people had to find ways of coping with. 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.

As the aging population continues explosive growth while virtually no growth is taking place in the under-50 population, marketers and their clients will be best served by challenging the left brain’s antagonism toward new information that challenges existing models of reality.

 

A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

At last! A new book that is thoroughly engaging as it tells us much of what we already know – or should know. This book is novel in that in order to experience greater marketing success in the future it turns our attention to our past. It is indeed, a back-to-the-future kind of book.  

Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran’s The Hyper-Social Organization takes us back to our roots – to times before recorded history when we became homo sapiens. It is a book about marketing in the age of so-called social media that reminds us of who we really are.

Like you probably are, I’m tired of the endless stream of books that claim to have new, breakthrough insights. Their authors typically have an idea that they think is unique but is more likely old wine in new bottles or at least not near as revolutionary as jacket copy makes out.  

While the marketing world at-large is going ga-ga over Web 2.0, Gossieaux and Ed Moran won’t let us forget that we are still Human 1.0. Technology may be vastly different from 10,000 years ago but human social organization and behavior is fundamentally as it was then. The authors remind us that our basic social needs have not changed in thousands of years.

They call to our attention the fact that despite all the friends you may have in your Facebook account and followers you have @Twitter, you are unlikely to maintain stable relationships with more than about 150 people. Guess what. On average, ancient farming villages and tribes were made up of about 150 people.

The jacket copy on The Hyper-Social Organization speaks of 5 steps to being hyper-social:

1.       Forget technology – understand the four drivers of successful communities.

2.       Forget market segments and consumers – think tribes and humans.

3.       Forget company centricity – think human centricity.

4.       Forget channels – think networks.

5.       Forget processes and hierarchies – think social messiness.

You can see from those 5 steps that Gossieaux and Ed Moran are dissing  a number of sacred cows in marketing. In doing so they present us with a refreshing view of the marketplace – not a new view, but a refreshing  view!

Gossieaux and Ed Moran remind us of how easy it is to get so swept up into technology that we forget the basics of what it has mean to be human in social terms for thousands of years. They do a good job of showing us how to use technology as a way of better meeting our ancient needs in the complex world of today.

 

 

 

 

How We Decide

I recently highlighted a new book about the brain: The Master and His Emissary by British neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Having read dozens of books about the brain over the years, I’m comfortable saying in my claim that this is one of the most important books ever written about the brain for general audiences.

But now comes another book about the brain:  How We Decide, by science writer Jonah Lehrer whose writing is highly accessible. We’re on the cusp of major changes in how we view the human brain and mind. This book does as better job than any I know about in introducing some of these changes to lay readers.   

The revealing lights of contemporary brain science have shown that our traditional views of what goes on between our ears is grossly out of whack with reality. New insights into the workings of the mind will influence every major field in which human behavior is a telling factor. From my perspective as a marketer, I foresee huge changes in how we shape our messages.

For instance, marketers need to learn more about how to get the attention of the right hemisphere of the brain. That is where most customer decisions originate and are concluded.

But how do you talk to the right brain?  The left side of the brain is the language side. The right brain has only primitive language abilities. A message that tells customers about the superior virtues of a product generally gets a yawn from the right brain. The right brain is deaf and blind to rational entreaties.

A message has to produce an emotional response to get the right brain’s attention. And because the right brain serves as a gateway to the left brain, no emotional response to a message by the right brain likely means no rational attention by the left brain.

The idea of so-called neuromarketing is getting a lot of attention these days. The term generally refers to consumer research using brain scanning tools. Researchers watch a consumer’s brain while she reacts to a word, image or other marketing-related stimulus. However, not many marketing firms can afford a $3 million fMRI scanner. So, the next best thing – no, the far better thing is for people involved in creating and approving marketing messages to learn something about how brains and minds work. In fact, save time and don’t pay any attention to reports of what great things await us in marketing as fMRI scanning technology gets better. As Jonah Lehrer wrote recently in his blog The Frontal Cortex

Functional MRI has been used to study all sorts of sexy psychological properties. You've probably seen the headlines: "Scientists Discover Love in the Brain!" and "This Is Your Brain on God!" Such claims are often accompanied by a pretty silhouette of a skull, highlighted with splotches of primary color. It's like staring at a portrait of the soul. It's also false. In reality, huge swaths of the cortex are involved in every aspect of cognition. The mind is a knot of interconnections, so interpreting the scan depends on leaving lots of stuff out, sifting through noise for the signal. We make sense of the data by deleting what we don't understand.

What's disappointing here isn't just that these early fMRI studies are overhyped or miss important facts. It's that this mistake is all too familiar. Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced -- it doesn't matter if it's a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine -- and we're told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn't it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can't reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here's a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle -- to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal.

So, buy a copy of How We Decide to take to the beach or off into the mountains with you on your summer vacation. But if you choose not to learn more about how the customer’s brain and mind work, maybe it’s time to consider changing your career. The only problem is I have a hard time thinking of a career that will not be changed by new insights into the workings of the intelligent mass of tissue between our ears.

 

Why the Right Brain Is a Great Partner in Marketing

I have recently finished a book that stole my attentions like none has in many years. It’s by British neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist.  Its title is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

Though it is very well written – even charming at times – it may not be an easy read for some people not accustomed to reading science books – in this case, brain science.  I suggest looking at readers’ reviews at Amazon to get a feel for the book. It is a truly amazing book.

The central theme of The Master is that the Western mind has become so dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain as to imperil humanity’s future. Now, while that might sound extreme, keep in mind that we live in extreme times that seem to be getting more and more extreme.

McGilchrist examines the influence of the brain’s hemispheres on Western Culture over a 2,500-year period.  You can see a summary of his ideas in the Wall Street Journal  here . It's worth taking a look at. 

Aside from McGilchrist’s concern that we may be slipping into a dystopian world (the opposite of a utopian world) such as profiled in Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, his descriptions of the differences between the two hemispheres are memorable for their clarity and detail. I say this from the perspective of many years of reading books about the brain. McGilchrist’s is without peer in its insights into the brain’s hemispheres.

The Master has much to offer readers, including the marketing crowd that is the largest group of readers of this blog.

For example, he describes why the left brain is resistant to new information regardless of how brilliantly it is presented. Further, the left brain will generally not process new information coming into the brain unless it has first been processed by the right brain. Knowing that, you should never again freight an ad with copious details about the features of a product. It simply will not get processed.  

Instead of telling customers how great your products or services are tell a story. I know you’ve heard that before, but how often do marketers really take that advice to heart?

The right brain pays attention to stories but not lectures. Stories should be word pictures because the right brain’s command of verbal language is somewhat primitive. It is the visual side of the brain, so the pictures it gets. The verbal arguments it does not.

You will find insights in The Master that could also help you with clients and others you work with/for. As an example, when you present a new idea, especially an out-of-the-box idea to a client or colleagues and get a negative response, it is almost certainly their left brains that are giving you thumbs down. Like your leg popping up when the doctor cracks you on your knee with a rubber hammer, the left brain reflexively rejects new information that does not conform to the model of reality it already has in place.

In contrast, the right brain lusts for novelty. So, if you want to sell an out-of-the-box idea to someone, start by getting the emotional, curious and story-conscious right brain involved. It is the portal to the left brain and if it likes what it sees, it will yank on the left brain’s chain to let it know to listen up and pay attention.

On a related topic, I find it interesting that marketers for some of the biggest brands (Coke is one such) have devoted considerable attention to electronic scanning consumer brains when they might more gainfully study consumers’ brains from a behavioral perspective. Hitachi now markets a brain analyzer to marketers that they clip on to consumers’ heads. I’m not a Luddite, but I think spending time learning about consumers’ behavior offers more to the marketer than reading lines on an electroencephalograph.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin: Part3

As pointed out in the previous post on this topic, “cluster husbandry is not about targeting consumers. It’s about encouraging them to become meaningfully engaged by interacting with them in an authentic voice.” The social foundation of a cluster in this sense is conversational reciprocity – two-way communications between participants in the cluster.  This is a key tool in fostering meaningful online engagement.

It is important to take into account that “two-way” communications is not limited to verbal communications. A person’s mere presence in a cluster communicates something if only curiosity about the cluster, who is it and why. From a marketer’s perspective cluster metrics can have enormously information value.  They can put the market analyst in the position of being  “a fly in the corner,” observing what other cluster participants are saying about a brand, their needs, the quality of their lives, their pains, but also their dreams, hopes and plans for the future.

The frequency with which a topic is discussed by participants in a cluster can also have great value to the analyst. It can be a measure of the intensity of a need and the percentage of cluster participants experiencing the need.

Advocates of cluster husbandry regard it as one of the most significant developments in Web 2.0 – a term widely used to reflect the transition of consumers from passive recipients of market information exchanges to active co-creators of market information. To an analyst skilled in gathering, analyzing and interpreting cluster metrics virtually no other form of exchanging information with consumers provides a more empathetic view of customers.  

Cluster husbandry takes its cues from customers’ values, circumstances needs and emotions, particularly as they are revealed in social networking venues. As such, cluster husbandry is strongly grounded in empathy: the act of identifying with and understanding another person’s values, circumstances, needs, and emotions.  

Engagement clusters are economic ecosystems within larger economic ecosystem that include industries, government entities and society at-large. Engagement clusters, like other economic ecosystems, are organized around the information needs and exchanges between their participants. This is the essence of the multiple stakeholder relationship (MSR) business model that will be the subject of an upcoming post in this series.)

The market analyst in cluster husbandry is not a passive recipient of information generated by consumer participants in a cluster. But the proactive focus different from what focused marketers’ attentions in the past when they were more concerned with “sales funnels” and the direct conversion of consumers’ attention into sales.

In marketing based on cluster husbandry, the marketer automatically shifts greater attention to “referral funnels” by empathetically connecting with consumers’ need. This requires a different way of thinking about marketing.  As the term “husbandry” suggests, it means growing, nurturing and feeding clusters with information relevant to the topics and needs generated by cluster populations.

Through feedback from r members of clusters comprising the total marketing realm of a company’s economic ecosystem, the marketer comes to understand how his or her messaging resonates throughout the various clusters and why.  This provides a knowledge-based foundation for refining or changing messaging and media buys to reflect the messages that emerged in the ecosystem and thereby increase conversion of interest to sales and extend advertising reach. 

Immersion Active recently designed and carried out a campaign that illustrates significant increases in marketing effectiveness that can be achieved from a consumer-centered cluster husbandry approach to marketing. 

Home Instead Senior Care wanted to connect with the adult children of older parents.  Immersion Active responded by first identifying a variety of channels adult children were using to communicate with others. By monitoring these channels, the market analysts was able to identify topics, needs and values that would be helpful in creating messages from Home Instead Senior Care that were relevant to potential customers.

Immersion Active inferred from its analysis of these channels that features-based advertising would likely have a weak conversion rate from attention to sales. In fact, it believed that the ability of such advertising to get prospects’ attention would be poor.

So, instead of a features-based approach, Immersion Active used a story-telling approach in emails and other online messaging.  The impact was unambiguously positive: A 400% percent conversion lift and a five-fold increase in service inquiries year over year. 

Additionally, Home Instead Senior Care experienced a more than doubling of the amount of sharing of content on its domain through the use of helpful, conversational resources. It found that that people who shared materials were over five times more likely to inquire about services as those who did not share.  That provides strong support for the importance placed on achieving meaningful online engagement that was discussed earlier and the vital importance of conversational reciprocity.

Special Thanks to Joe Ford, Director of Analytics and Optimization, Immersion Active, for help in developing this series.

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin: Part 2

My previous post introduced a Web 2.0 era  definition of “cluster,” a term traditionally associated in marketing with demographic segments. This post continues the discussion with an examination of the art and science of cluster husbandry.

 Cluster husbandry is not about targeting consumers. It’s about encouraging them to become meaningfully engaged by interacting with them in an authentic voice. As the agricultural term “husbandry” implies, cluster husbandry turns marketing efforts into a farming-like practice. It’s about generating and tending to a community of supporters of a brand. 

Cluster husbandry is genuinely consumer centric: it starts with a more holistic view of consumers’ needs than characteristic of traditional marketing. In the past, marketers have tightly focused on bending consumers’ wills to their wills. In cluster husbandry, the marketer strives to wed his or her will to that of consumers. Cluster husbandry is an authentic expression of relationship marketing.

Despite thousands of articles, entire seminars and many books on the subject over the past two decades, relationship marketing has generally not been about caring relationships with consumers; rather, it has been about finding more effective ways of targeting consumers and “reeling them in.” For example, so-called customer relationship management (CRM) is not about managing customer relationships. It is about managing customer data. Better that it be called customer data management.

CRM is a quantitative approach to markets. Cluster husbandry is a qualitative approach. It includes quantitative tasks but “numbers” don’t dominate the process.  Numbers are important in setting objectives and feedback metrics that help the cluster specialist determine how well objectives are being met. They are especially important in gauging consumer satisfaction with their participation in a cluster social network.

One way to view clusters is as ecosystems in which people, places and things are organized around exchanges of information concerning topics and needs of the people involved, be they consumers or providers. David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, the principles in Immersion Active and sponsors of this blog brought forth this idea in their book Dot Boom. In another time they might have used the term cluster management.”  However, that would imply ambitions of control that are more suitable to the posture of traditional marketing. Cluster husbandry is not about gaining and exercising control over consumers. It’s about collaborating with them in determining their needs and finding effective means of satisfying those needs.

 Cluster husbandry is like traditional marketing with respect to one overarching objective: finding ways to break through the clutter of advertising.   However, the cluster manager will likely discover more ways to do this than the traditional marketer will because the cluster manager works both sides of the equation: first, from the consumer side, then from the provider side. The magic lies in seamlessly integrating the both sides in the information  exchange process.

To the cluster manager, the consumer is not a number in a data set. The consumer, as David Ogilvy famously said, “is your wife.”  Obviously he meant that metaphorically. He wanted to bring home the flesh and blood reality the consumer represents by positioning her in personal terms. Ogilvy, one of the greatest marketing minds of all time by common  accord, understood relationship marketing before it became a buzz word in marketing and long before everyone had a personal computer on their desk to focus the marketer’s mind on number instead of on consumers’ circumstances, needs and emotions.

Ogilvy understood consumers as people as few marketers since his time have. Getting such an understanding is the best place to start in setting up your first cluster husbandry ecosystem. That is where I will pick up in my next post.

 

Avoiding the Half Brain Syndrome in Marketing Research

Have you seen the TED video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a massive hemorrhagic stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain?

Taylor is a neuroanatomist. This gave her unique insight into her stroke as it unfolded.

A hemorrhagic stroke is heavy duty trauma. In Taylor’s case it shut down her left cortical hemisphere, the side associated with speaking, reasoning and analytical activities.  She was left with just the right hemisphere to view and interpret events coming within the reach of her consciousness. It rendered the world far differently from the one she experienced before the stroke. She lost all sense of any boundaries between where she began and ended. She felt part of a splendid whole that infused her with an eerie euphoria. At first it didn’t matter that the stroke had silenced the verbal centers of her left brain. As the stroke continued unfolding she became vividly aware that the right brain and left brain are of two different minds, neither of which is capable by itself of giving an accurate read on reality.

Dr. Taylor’s story bears an important metaphorical caveat for economists, investment analysts, marketers and others who try to foretell the future base on mathematical reductions of reality. It takes both sides of the brain to come up with an accurate picture  of reality. The analytical left brain for all its powers of logic and reasoning cannot do it on its own. Einstein knew that. He famously observed, “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.”

Wall Street “quants” – those analysts who live by numbers – have come in for some sharp criticism in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crash. Macroeconomists have also taken in on the chin because none of any prominence saw the Crash coming. In fact, the party line well into 2008 is that the year would experience modest growth.

A dozen years ago I wrote an article for American Demographics about huge shortcomings in quantitative market research. It produced by far the largest number of reader responses in the magazine’s history. I don’t know how many ended up on the editor’s desk but I received over 400 emails, many expressing the thanks for letting them know why market research so often misses the mark.

Market research is a more than $6 billion industry. The fact that some 90 percent of new products and product line extensions fail suggests that much of that $6 billion dollars is needlessly wasted. At the core of the problem is the dearth of understanding of human behavior among researchers.  

 

A number of prominent entrepreneurs have a deep distrust of statistically grounded research, particularly in consumer research. These include Phil Knight (Nike), Steve Jobs (Apple), Howard Schultz (Starbucks) and Scott Cook (Intuit). Scott Bedbury, who helped Phil Knight turn Nike into an international brand had this to say about traditional consumer market research:

 

The greatest problem with relying on traditional methodologies … is that they provide management with reams of statistical data, which may tempt those lacking in confidence to go against their common sense and gut intuition.. That, to put it mildly, is not the Nike way. In fact, prior to my first interview with Phil Knight, I had been specifically advised to avoid mentioning the words “marketing” or “research” in speaking with him. Apparently, he regarded both words as symbolic of what is wrong with most businesses.

 

After helping Knight turn Nike into one of the world’s best-known brands, Bedbury hired on with Howard Schultz to do much the same for Starbuck’s. Again, he found himself working for an entrepreneur with a strong bias against quantitative consumer research.

 Intuit founder Scott Cook puts great faith in anthropological, aka ethnological research. Cook sent employees into stores to “pick up” customers who had just bought an Intuit product. They were to accompany customers home to see how they integrated their Intuit purchase into their lives. Cook wanted to give customers accounting products that reflected their way of doing business.

Cook’s choice of anecdotal research over statistical research played a major role in making Intuit the leader in domestic and small business accounting software.  Unable to compete effectively, Bill Gates made a move to buy Intuit. However the SEC scotched the proposed marriage and Intuit went on to become even more dominant in its market niche.

I’ll close with another Einsteinian bit of wisdom:  Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.  All the entrepreneurs I just cited obviously buy into that wisdom. I wonder how many of my readers do.

P.S Be sure to watch Jill Bolte Taylor's incredible story.

 

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.

 

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.