Frameworks for thinking.
Photo by Paul Bracey
An interesting theme in The Black Swan (which I am currently reading) is that we lack the ability to make accurate statistical inferences because the largest part of human development took place in a world where that ability was unnecessary. The example used in the book is that one might infer from the statement “most terrorists are Moslems”, that most Moslems are terrorists. However, even if the former were true, it would not lead to the latter statement being true, simply because there are a huge number of Moslems compared to a much smaller number of terrorists. Contrast this to the statement that most killers are wild animals. In the primitive world, it would have served your descendants well to assume the reverse.
In marketing I believe we suffer from a similar myopia. A part of my presentation at Polygamous will touch upon the legacy of the industrial age upon our marketing theory and practice. Because the prevailing sentiment during the industrial age was based around the scientific management or the one best way, I believe that we subconsciously built all our thinking upon this foundation, even when we were clearly not dealing with physical objects. It was during the industrial era that the notion of brand imagery first came into vogue. Imagery is as abstract a concept as you can possibly imagine, yet it was also during this period that AIDA was the preferred theory of communications effect.
It is difficult to imagine a more linear, mechanical and wrongheaded model for thinking about how communications lead to behavior than AIDA, yet it undoubtedly made sense during this period because it fit the assembly line mentality of the times. Yet even then, it ought to have been clearly visible that ideas do not live within the constraints set by the physical world. Ideas can grow exponentially without exponential effort, they can wither and die even when they’re well fed and they can be one thing one day and the opposite thing the next.
I’ve written a lot about the increasingly abstract nature of the world and the economy. What this means is that more and more of our experience will be subject to the laws of ideas rather than the laws of nature. I believe, however, that our ability to thrive in this kind of world will be hindered by the fact that our frameworks for thinking are inextricably linked to our experience in the real world. We subconsciously build entropy, Newton’s laws of motion and so on, into everything we do, even as they become less and less relevant to most of what we do.
This is true on a large scale and it’s also true on smaller scales. Even though we know that traffic on the Internet is not like traffic on the freeway, we persist in the same metaphors and models to our thinking about how we market to one form of traffic versus another.
Because of that, I think this is possibly the most significant problem our industry faces. It transcends expertise in one form of media versus another. It is larger than business models, or organizational structures. It is more significant that what people are watching/doing or if they’re watching/doing at all. It is far more fundamental and far more insidious. It is as hard to spot as latent racism, and therefore probably as rampant.