In 1920, Neils Bohr (who has arguably the best name of any scientist in history, save perhaps Dr. Richard Titball of the Netherlands) formulated the “correspondence principle.”
In a nutshell, which is incidentally where Bohr spent most of his winters, it’s a forced reconciliation between classical and quantum mechanics.
I say “forced” because it was decreed, rather than proven.
And so physicists have spent much of the past 90 years attempting—without success—to fully explain the disparate behavior of microscopic and macroscopic systems. What hope is there, then, for marketers, who’ve spent cumulatively about a day and a half?
Yet this is our ultimate charge as marketing professionals: to reconcile observations of individuals with observations of mass markets in a grand, unified theory.
How are we doing? In a word: Drinkability.
I’m further reminded of our collective failure by the recent success story from the CERN facility in Geneva, where scientists have broken the record for high-energy subatomic particle collisions, and potentially recreated the universe’s initial mechanics following the Big Bang.
Now there was some risk involved. It cost billions of dollars, and there was a slight possibility of miniature black holes devouring the universe (I’d love to see the crisis communications plan CERN’s PR team put together for this contingency). But the point is, they’re making progress.
We marketers, on the other hand, are using EEG scans to determine whether individual consumers prefer penguins or giraffes.
We’re using the same, tired focus groups to test vague product attributes—in search of safe, broad consensus. We’re, quite literally, asking whether it’s important to be able to drink a beverage. And we’re building multi-million dollar campaigns around these “insights.”
In short, we’re still looking for easy answers in a complex world.
Quantum theory isn’t simple. It’s tremendously intricate—a disciplined, patient examination of concealed reality.
The marketing community’s response: crowdsourcing.
Tags: Brain Scan Your Way to Marketing Success, Heroes of the Manhattan Project