If you believe that hard science has no place in the softer worlds of advertising and marketing, this article makes you to rethink...If you have nothing better to do, reading books of quotations is a pleasant way to spend some time.I enjoy the definitions that pop up as various practitioners describe their professions. For example, adman Jerry della Femina describes advertising as "the most fun you can have with your clothes on". Cosmologist Carl Sagan defines doing science as "spending time spinning hypotheses, checking to see if they make sense, whether they conform to what we know, and thinking of tests that substantiate or deflate these hypotheses".
The economist John Keynes once observed: "The real difficulty lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones." An old idea whose time has come is the belief that hard science has no place in the softer worlds of advertising and marketing. I dispute this, and my thesis today is that by escaping from this old idea, we will learn how to do more effective advertising and marketing. The science that I believe ad people must embrace is cognitive neuroscience—the study of how our brains function, how the brain makes sense of the world, and how it goes about making decisions based on past experience.
In 1992, when I first said this at an advertising conference, the reaction was unexpected. No one in the audience challenged me, but they certainly did not start to apply brain science in their day-to-day advertising activities. However, I got a flood of invitations to speak at other advertising conferences, for what I guess was my oddity value. People seemed to enjoy listening to what I said— they just didn't do anything with it. |
