The great Drayton Bird once related a rather
damning criticism of advertising once made by a client of his. "You
advertising people.... you go very deeply into the surface of things, don't
you?"
It is of course true. Yet half of me feels no need to apologise for this bias.
The importance of the superficial is hugely underrated. As Matthew Taylor
remarked last week at the IPA's 44 Club, we can talk about quantitative easing
as much as we like, but Gordon brown's electoral fate has been sealed not by
his macroeconomic policy decisions but by a tendency to display bizarrely
demented face movements which appear like some early failed attempt at Supermarionation.
Yet there is one form of shallowness in our business that does pain me. The
fact that, as I remarked in my IPA inaugural speech, our models of human
behaviour and persuasion are so pathetically shallow and make no attempt to
place our discipline within any evidence-based scientific framework.
"Rather like astrologers," I said, quoting my colleague Alasdair
Graham, "we use a language which is convincing to fellow converts but
sounds suspiciously like bollocks to anyone else."
Or, as I wish I had said,
"Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain
uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature - research by
evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary
psychologists..... as a result, they don't have access to a good map of the
human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What
marketers need is Darwin."
The reason I did not quote this sentence -
along with many others by its author - is simply that they had not been
published when I made the speech. This needle-sharp assessment (though I would
add behavioural economists and information economists to his list) comes from Spent,
by Geoffrey Miller, a Darwinian Professor of Behavioural Psychology who has
decided to investigate (with a healthy mixture of fascination and horror) the
deeper origins of consumerism.
Alongside Steve Harrison's, this in the
one book on marketing and advertising you should read this year. (In fact it is
interesting that Steve Harrison's book also includes a plea for better human
insight and cites both Alex Bogusky's and Bill Bernbach in their preference for
anthropologists over trend-spotters and other surface-skaters).
Now, in our defence (and Miller acknowledges this), it is only in the last few
years that economists and psychologists have been prepared to speak to
marketers. For years, the right wing within academia (often economists) didn't
like to acknowledge us because we disturbed their neo-classical model and the
idea of the perfectly rational agents who operated within it. So much so, that
The Economist for years employed an advertising correspondent who seemed to
despise advertising. On the other hand, the Left (usually social scientists)
didn't like us because they thought we manipulated people into buying Hummers.
It is only in recent years that a few people outside marketing have been
prepared to overcome their initial distaste to discover that our job is an area
worthy of study.
But in my view it is vital that we extend a
hand of welcome to these people. Not least because we have quite a lot to
contribute, as well as even more to learn. But also because it will be
impossible for us to preach the value of marketing beyond the choir if we
continue to speak only Marketingese - a language unintelligible to outsiders -
rather than finding a shared vocabulary with people whose frame of reference
stretches a little further than ours - and which is grounded on some solid
scientific foundations rather than on mere marketing case-law.
I should reveal a few prejudices
here. I am a bit right wing, and also a bit Anglocentric. If I am asked to
connect what we do to the world of big ideas, for me that means Adam Smith not
Marx, Darwin
not Freud, Dawkins not Derrida. I would be perfectly happy to accommodate
testable theories from elsewhere. But we must realise that, while we may be
obsessed with the superficial, this does not mean that what we do is trivial or
should driven by the fleeting whims of fashion.
Bernbach was convinced that the fundamentals
of human nature don't change much; in fact they may be even older than he
thought. In a passage that will fascinate Mark Earls, many herd animals
(including dogs) exhibit many of the personality types of humans, as do most
higher primates, cats, ferrets and (weirdly) hedgehogs. This stuff is older
than us.
As if that wasn't enough, Miller also socks
it to demography and that old planner's crutch Maslow. Not before bloody time.
Buy this book.
