This led me to the notion that sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to individuals. Whether in business or otherwise we are guilty of looking to the mass; the group; the collective and not to the person – the people who in simple one by one fashion can be aggregated – but alone often represent different views.

A recent study of political parties in the United States showed a wide diversity of ideas at the individual level – despite a strong cohesion at the group level. Seems to me the lesson can be applied to any group and maybe can help to explain why response to advertising and other messages remains relatively low – too much group not enough person insight.

All of which, of course, led me to a cool quote:

There are too many people, and too few human beings.
~Robert Zend

And there you have it – dogs get their day…even on hot and sticky afternoons and we need to pay more attention to people…

Posit this: the 4th dimension is the world of our senses. The place where sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch combine in neural ways. That is what separates experience from computer simulation – no matter how good.

Think on it.
Customer centricity suggests customer awareness and awareness to me suggests deep human understanding.

Read the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/business/29cell.html?pagewanted=1&ref=technology

And think on this quote from the article: “Our job is to be behaviorists and psychologists. We constantly have to be reminding ourselves that we tend to be geek types and our customers are not,” Ehtisham Rabbani, VP product strategy and marketing LG Electronics.

Interestingly there is a growing web business in optimizing web experience through observing user behavior in focus groups and one on one sessions… Think on that.

Again, none of this negates data; analytics; modeling and such – to the contrary – it’s the combination that makes it more powerful.

Either alone is lacking.

But I do believe it has to start with the basic human truths

Technology by itself begins to sound awfully philosophical;

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
~Bertrand Russell

And there you have it!

Contrast that with “Swift Boat,” a spot (actually two) that caused another U.S. Presidential candidate to crash and burn 40 years later.

http://livingroomcandidate.org/search/index.php?search_string=swift+boat&action=new_search&x=15&y=9

The spots ran over 700 times in three states and were the subject of blogs and cable news and chat rooms and pundits the world over.

What’s my point?

Somehow we think our age discovered the ability to lob a “bomb” and ignite a media frenzy. Somehow we believe that we created the viral, the video hand-off, the pass around factor and the all important buzz…

You could say who cares? What difference does it make? So what if it was done before?

Ah – but here is the rub. What can we learn from the past? What can we learn from a time when the tools of pass around and sharing were primitive at best and it was the sheer power of the communication to connect; the ability of its message to cut through and the total and utter simplicity of its message to get the point across in a memorable way.

Watch them. Watch them all. Contrast them. This has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with insight into the times — insight into people and the ability to create and communicate.

It also has a lot to do with the notion that the Internet does nothing that we don’t do off line first. It just makes it easier or more efficient.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.
~Esther Dyson,

So next time you think about the Web – think about human behavior and what we can accentuate; make better; more powerful and more efficient.

Think about The Daisy Girl and the power of communication in a time when everything was simpler on one hand – but way harder on the other.

Put the power to use as we should; as the world needs it…

What do you think?

So what was that banter really about? What was that “dirty little secret?”

How about this: its web site just isn’t that trafficked; but the publication is quoted often.

It isn’t about news. It is very much about opinion. Immediacy is not critical to this publication but depth and controversy is.

Could there be an insight here? The human need to self-select channel, device is not the issue, content is king…

Think on this:

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
~Albert Einstein

Maybe the truth is that sometimes there is just no cat…

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Send me good examples?

Our business is about listening, right?
In fact, isn’t all dialogue about listening?

Isn’t one of our key unique business propositions about our ability to help our clients’ listen to their customers?

And, isn’t one of the key benefits of the web the ability to really listen and listen carefully?

So if listening is the key, then do you agree with the following:

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber

It got me thinking. It suggests that helping our clients frame new, insightful, interesting, different and “out-of-sight-of-the-box’ questions is more important than walking in with lots of answers…

Knowing the questions—the real questions, the hard questions, the wild questions—will get us to answers we might never before have considered….Do you agree?

And, that is my question…

I have no hesitation in my reaction. Yet, read the financial and business news and analysis, in any channel, and you will see that there is a debate. There are folks who really do believe (fervently I might add) that we are in the age of software coded response, i.e., the ability to predict based on past behavior is more relevant than “touchy-feely” consumer marketing of the past.

By now, you may have guessed (if you didn’t know before) how I feel about this issue. Then, I saw this quote from a US TV show of the last century and it became even clearer:

Sometimes the mind, for reasons we don’t necessarily understand, just decides to go to the store for a quart of milk.
Northern Exposure, Three Doctors, 1993

There you have it. Sometimes I just want a quart of milk; or a pair of pants in a color that I never before considered. And sometimes I just want tickets to a movie that defies my taste.

What is your thinking?

WOW! What a revelation. What a concept. What news – clearly related to the new age of e-commerce and alternate channels…

WOW? Come on folks. What do we know about experiences? Good bad and indifferent… what is the cause and effect cycle? What is the loyalty framework? What motivates us to buy; to buy again and again or to switch brands – products; services and retailers?

WOW!!!!! Seriously, if ever there was an opportunity for us, our expertise, our philosophy, it is here and now. Clients want and need the knowledge of accumulated data points partnered with the wisdom of experience… of trial and error… of success, and yes, of failure. Most important, they need to be connected to their consumers, clients, users, buyers, customers. They need real life associations and linkages. They need insight! INSIGHT.

What they don’t need is sound bites taken out of context or snippets of thinking divorced from their source or the shallow veneer of new speak…

All of this leads me to a wonderful thought I saw this morning, for the first time, in my pique at the news report:

“Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotes”
Orson Welles

And there you have it. Lester is like Shakespeare…let’s perform the book…

See if you agree…

To me, mechanization, industrialization and “technologization” are all based on the lessons of early man. Give me a lever, a wheel, a hammer! There is an immense body of work and output I can effect and change and revolutionize— and then evolutionize— until I reach (if ever) the ultimate state of perfection.

On the other hand, not all the mechanical, industrial or technological power in the world will ever (in my opinion) impact in the slightest creative thinking—writing; art; dance; drama—or the ability to understand human insight. Do you see where I’m going?

Our business is all about human insight. We use all of the latest tools available. We even develop them to help us, to feed us information, to make us more informed. But, the latest, greatest computer-optimized behavioral algorithms know nothing more than what was input. That is why creative thinking, deep insight and understanding, motivating and enticing executions, meaningful offers, emotional segmentation— and all of the rest of what we do (on a good day)—are not just important today; in my opinion, they will become even more critical as our clients continue to discover that the promise of plug and play CRM is hollow.

In my opinion here is the thought that nails it for us:

“In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.”
Unknown

And there you have it. If you don’t know who I am and why I really buy and yet you continue to contact me, bother me, push me and annoy me……need I say more?

What do you think?

Sometimes a little common sense and a little human insight go a long way.
Do we always think enough about our target audience? Do we extend the right sensitivity to all of our communications so we, our potential responders, understand that we really do “know” them.

Think about the following:

“On my income tax 1040 it says ‘Check this box if you are blind.’ I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.”
Tom Lehrer

How many three-inch away checkmarks do we get??? Perhaps that’s why response rates tend to be single digit.

It seems that maybe the terror of the unknown and the anxiety about failure, or possibly the dread of looking un-cool/un-hip, causes panic-related paralysis. It is considered better to ignore, hide behind ROI, budgets or resource allocation and hope that time is on your side. Either you will have moved on to another job and it becomes someone else’s problem (a real issue in a world where the average CMO is in the position less than two years, where they go for the short term instead of rocking the boat); or the sheer size and momentum of your business hides everything but the big obvious marketing initiatives – a phenomenon we have seen many times… And of course, does it really?
Bottom line, how do we cope? What should our approach be? What is the message of motivational support that will allow, nay, force our clients and us into action?

And, here is the thought:

“The computer is a moron.”
Peter F. Drucker

Simple. If ever a business quote opened the door for Wunderman and its thinking, this is the one.

I have spoken about this from atop a soapbox before, but it is becoming ever truer. In and of itself, technology is nothing but an enabler. The question is, of what?

No matter how brilliant the thinking behind it, the complexity of its design, or the intricacy of its model, technology without human insight built into its application and use is nothing. It is dumb.

You, my friends and colleagues, make it smart. You make it work. You make it profitable for our clients (and by extension us). And you make it a natural and powerful extension of all the activities that we are comfortable and at home with today – activities that at one time made our predecessors very uncomfortable and alienated.

The answer is never technology. The answer is always what the human/people need is that must be met, the action that is required and the result that is desired. Answer those questions, and the enabler becomes a catalyst for the solution, but it is never, in fact, THE solution.

Think about it. Read the following two paragraphs taken from the latest Annual Reports of key “Internet” companies and see if you think they get it.

“From the beginning, our focus has been offering our customers compelling value…Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way…We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search and easy to browse format…”
Amazon 2003 Annual Report

“Key components of our community philosophy are maintaining an honest and open marketplace and treating individual users with respect.”
eBay 2003Annual Report

What do you think? Your turn.