By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine "Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published July 2002
Although the processing power of the silicon chip has increased by a factor of 10,000 in the last 25 years, the processing power of the human brain has remained unchanged for millennia. This is a powerful reality for marketers to vigorously embrace.
In a world where “Secrets to Success” are peddled by academics, writers, gurus and consultants like so many packs of washing detergent on a supermarket shelf, surely recognition of this basic fact is the real and only secret to marketing success in what is, in so many other ways, a new marketing era?
One of the greatest struggles facing marketers right now is the truly turbulent nature of our times, characterised by a never ending series of often fundamental social, technological and economic changes.
Media is proliferating at a rate never before experienced. Technology is actually spawning media that we never dreamed off just 5 years ago.
Remember when the launch of a new fmcg product in New Zealand involved just a handful of media choices? Bit of tv, spread across a couple of channels that looked remarkably similar, some colour pages in New Zealand Woman’s Weekly and maybe some strips in a couple of issues of The Listener? (except they weren’t really choices, they were forgone conclusions – we only made them seem like choices to make Media Planners & Buyers look busier & cleverer than they really were!)
Today, those same Media Planners (or their bunny replacements, more likely) are faced with magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio, television, direct mail, telemarketing, audio & video tapes, multi-media CD-ROMs, the Internet, Intranets, Online Networks, e-mail, fax-mail – and on and on it goes.
And how does the concept of “markets of one” fit in with the mass communications opportunities screaming out from the new technologies and the new applications for some of the old technologies?
Surely the term “Relationship Marketing” is at odds with the increasingly impersonal nature of many forms of marketing communications (and, indeed, transactional and service communications)?
Isn’t a truism that voice mail and e-mail inhibits, rather than enhances, human communication and interaction?
And do we really want to do our banking at 3am whilst communicating with a modem rather than having a chat with a teller at 3pm?
For once, however, let’s spare a caring and compassionate thought for the marketer, that strange sort of a person who has to try and make sense of this lot (and a vast number of other issues that space precludes me even touching on here).
Market Research used to be the answer to a heck of a lot of this stuff. But not anymore. Why? Because we now know that most it was flawed and much of the methodology available and, even, applied, today is flawed too. (And that’s all to do with how the neocortex of the brain behaves versus the limbic system, a conflict that results in us saying one thing and doing another and that is something that really buggers up much market research! Throw in some considerations of the way in which the hypothalamus functions and your own brain really will start to hurt)
So what about that poor, stressed, overworked, over stimulated, over educated, Marketing Manager?
How do they make sense of the nature of markets? The needs/wants of customers and prospects? The most cost effective ways to communicate with markets? How to ensure that a marketing database is a lot more than a giant, electronic, business card holder? The paradoxes of mass versus individual? The challenges of facilitating relationships between customers and computers?
Well, the answer is the secret.
The secret that I shared at the top of the page.
The secret that recognises that, despite the turbulent and chaotic times in which we live, we as people have not changed one little jot - not in terms of how we are designed, structured and function.
And that’s great news because it means that we can finally come to terms with the reality that marketing is about the psychology of human behaviour and that this hasn’t changed and will not change (at least, not until we have chips implanted in our skulls)
Therefore, the answer is about ensuring that if we wish to influence human behaviour, we need to understand it a lot better than we do. And that becomes a whole lot easier with the technologies available to us today (let alone in the immediate and medium term futures).
Understanding the psychology of human behaviour has always been the key to successful marketing and always will be.
So here’s a breakthrough idea.
Let’s go and concentrate on customers and prospects as people once more and we’ll inevitably gain a greater understanding of the psychology of those people and that, in turn, will give us pretty much all the answers we need to enable us to become and remain, breakthrough marketers.
Simple. Empowering. Unchanging.
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