Rockfish

Put eight monkeys in a room. In the middle of the room is a ladder, leading to a bunch of bananas hanging from a hook on the ceiling.

Each time a monkey tries to climb the ladder, all the monkeys are sprayed with ice water, which makes them miserable. Soon enough, whenever a monkey attempts to climb the ladder, all of the other monkeys, not wanting to be sprayed, set upon him and beat him up. Soon, none of the eight monkeys ever attempts to climb the ladder.

One of the original monkeys is then removed, and a new monkey is put in the room. Seeing the bananas and the ladder, he wonders why none of the other monkeys are doing the obvious. But undaunted, he immediately begins to climb the ladder.

All the other monkeys fall upon him and beat him silly. He has no idea why.

However, he no longer attempts to climb the ladder.

A second original monkey is removed and replaced. The newcomer again attempts to climb the ladder, but all the other monkeys hammer the crap out of him.

This includes the previous new monkey, who, grateful that he’s not on the receiving end this time, participates in the beating because all the other monkeys are doing it. However, he has no idea why he’s attacking the new monkey.

One by one, all the original monkeys are replaced. Eight new monkeys are now in the room. None of them have ever been sprayed by ice water. None of them attempt to climb the ladder. All of them will enthusiastically beat up any new monkey who tries, without having any idea why.

From John’s jokes

I once asked a Roman Catholic and deeply religious relative what the meaning of this verse from the Bible was. “In the begining was the word, and the word was God: – John 1:1. She told me that the ‘word’ was ‘Jesus’.

Our world and everything we perceive is a result of our ability to define it, and the ability to define our world is a direct result of our understanding of both external phenomena as well as noumena. To understand a thing we have to first find out more about it. Not just the thing in itself, but also it’s effect on other elements that interact with it.

Without enquiry all we have is the periscope sticking out of the ocean and for all we know it could very well be a rusty old pipe.So very often we assume that our definition of a thing is the actual knowing of it, and I can see this in my observations everyday.

Does the Sun rise in the east and set in the west? Nope, it’s stationary. Yet the way we define our world around us makes us believe that this is the way it works. Another gem is “My mind is restless” (Nope you are restless.) Because one makes the distinction he automatically assumes that the mind can be made to rest while the individual stands by. This is not true because the individual IS THE mind.

We create our own unique vision of the world everytime we speak. And everytime we speak we form new definitions. New definitions means new neural pathways in the brain. Newer pathways eventually become old habits and before you know it you world view is set in concrete.

One can argue that this is the way it has to be and one cannot pick a nebulous answer because it could be termed schizophrenic. When you’re at a Horror movie, you’d call it sucky if it didn’t scare you. If it did scare you, you still don’t run out of the theatre clinging on to life. You kow that it’s make believe. The mind is doing a pretty good job of sitting on the fence here, dont you think?

People automatically assume that the mind is set in concrete, This is just not true. I believe that the mind is actually a name for a framework that shifts every instant depending on various factors. My nature which is a combination of my environment as well as my encoded traits determine my responses.

The linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf once suggested that Language is not just a way of expressing our view of the world, but that language itself determines this view. Whorf supported his theories by claiming that different cultures view the world differently based on their own linguistic systems. This is known as the ‘Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis’.

The theory was apparently disproved by Eleanor Rosch who claimed the opposite. That language follows perception and that our language evolves based on new perceptions. She tried to prove this through her experiments with the Dani tribe of New Guinea who have no words for individual colours. Just terms roughly coresponding to ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Her experiment showed that the Dani tribe had no problem remembering a range of colours though they had no linguistic tags for it.(See her Prototype theory.)

Whorf has not been proven wrong because to even categorise based on a prototype, one still needs the first benchmark objet, which has to be defined. I think Rosch can prove the manifestations of a decision but ultimately the process by which the decision was arrived at is subjective noumenon and cannot actually be known.

Over the last few years, Al Jazeera has been able to gain a solid foothold in terms of international viewership, except perhaps in America. (Islamic Broadcaster = Influence Paranoia). Al Jazeera’s recent decision to make high quality footage of the Gaza invasion public under the Creative Common’s license is a brilliant move.

This allows Al Jazeera to work around broadcast gagging to directly reach it’s audiences through blogs, forums and video sites like youtube. While Israel may have restricted international media in hotspots, Al Jazeera who was already in the thick of it has effectively turned the tables.

From International Herald Tribune:
“Part of our mission, our mandate, is to get our news out,” said
Mohamed Nanabhay, a 29-year-old Al Jazeera executive who established
the company’s new-media group in 2006. “We don’t have the direct
commercial pressures that others have. If we can make some money that
is great.”

Download or view the videos here.

The one property of sentience that continues to confound philosophers, psychiatrists and neuroscientists alike is consciousness. While we are learning a lot about how it manifests itself, very little is known about the origin, seat or actual properties of this phenomena. (or noumenon?)

Cartesian Dualism

If you follow western philosophy then you’re probably aware of everyone’s favorite whipping dog, Cartesian dualism.

Rene Descartes - Felt that there is a clear divide between body & mind

Rene Descartes was among the first to acknowledge consciousness in his now classic, demon-in-the-mind hypothesis. While his rationalisations may have been admirable (in his time and society) he also effectively created what is today called the mind-body divide. The general idea of this hypothesis is that the mind does not have access to the physical world and vice-versa.

I don’t think Descartes suspected for a bit the outcome of his rationalisations. His views seem to have spawned loads of quicketyquack psyche related ’sciences’ that profit off of the perceived mind-body divide. While Philosophy of mind proponents have repeatedly debunked Cartesian duality, it is very hard to erase from popular social thought. Even today it’s possible to hear people talk of body & mind as if they were two separate entities. Why is this a problem? Read an earlier rant here.

Marketing and Psychology

Traditional marketing which made psychology the poster boy of modern scientific thought, still uses this model to arrive at key decisions. The term, Psychography which relates to psychological profiling is a key exhibit of how this logic still rules the roost. I propose a rather different and a much more modern approach.

It's important to map a physiological basis to strategies. Dusty old psychological case studies just won't do!

Neuroresearch and Marketing

I propose that marketeers look at human conciousness from the point of modern neuro-research and less from the vantage point of psychological case studies. Themodern view of conciousness including untested theories such as Operational Architectonics suggest that we have perhaps lesser ‘control’ over perception than we originally thought. Age old arguments against so called ‘free-will’ by Sufis, Gnostics and Mystics are begining to make much more sense in the light of modern research.

Dilbert on free will. Click for a larger picture.

Our system, is finely tuned in to the environment in which we live. Throughout the day our bodies alter temperatures, maintain hormones and generate or discard cells without our being the least bit aware of it. This is good, because having to maintain attention across the board will leave very little focus for meaningful activity. Having established that, the next question is that of attention, or to be anal, Selective Attention.

It’s worth quickly quoting the venerable wiki, quoting William James…

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German…

How people pay attention

The ability to pay attention also seems to be dependant on one’s nature. Some people can be more attentive than others. Attention in itself is useless without one other component. Memory!

Organisation of memory networks. But is this the complete picture?

The word memory is increasingly becoming redundant as a term to classify new discoveries on memory. It’s implications far overshoot the popular understanding of this phenomena and the discussion of memory in itself is perhaps material for another post because of it’s rather humungous framework. In this area, memory seems to play an important role of ‘holding-up’ to attention, pieces of information from the subject’s past.

Working Memory Model - By Baddeley & Hitch

This process combined with attention itself allows the subject to make rational choices. The system seems to rapidly shift attention based on sensory data and then almost immediately looks for a memory that it can base the incoming data upon. If such a memory exists then depending on the nature of the person the follow-up action takes place. In the absence of data there is either confusion or the subject abruptly abandons the data… or if certain historians are to be believed, do not even see the data currently being offered. (Such as the early Incans who could not see the ships of the spaniards only because they had never seen ships before.)

Consciousness in Indian Vedic Philosophy

The very same model can also be found in Indian Vedic philosophy. The theory of consciousness points out that Manas and Buddhi work pretty much in the same sense. Manas (as the carrier of attention) shifts the attention constantly and Buddhi (Metaphorically explained as a mirror) holds up the data to cross-reference with past information. The classical example used is that of someone who mistakes a rope for a snake in bad-light and then who realises his mistake is a good example of how Buddhi and Manas operate.

Applying the model

This model firstly stops seperating customers from their minds and looks at people as individuals. Second, brand managers who look at a campaign (Print, web, retail or whatever) as a single stretch of a marketing initiative should relook at their strategies. Rather than one-shot spends to ‘create a splash’, managers should look at the brand’s environment as pin points of many little areas of customer engagement.

You dont hold one’s attention for a sustained period of time, rather you create multiple experiences points that both reinforce as well as add to the subject’s slowly accumulating knowledge of the brand. Over time, repetition and an increase in the brand’s personality (through sensory devices) creates familiarity in the customer’s mind.

- George Supreeth

Bibliography and Books you can borrow from me if you’re in Bangalore

Consciousness explained : Daniel Dennet
The Hindu Sound: William Corlett & John Moore
The Undiscovered Mind: John Horgan
Psychology Today: A Random House Textbook
Patanjali’s Yogasutras: Taimini
Fooled by Randomness: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There’s an old saying. “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”  Decisions on branding typically follow the age old statistical scientific confirmation route. The idea is that you conduct a dipstick study based on your expectations, see where it points at and run with it. This is fine, except that it conveniently forgets a couple of key factors. The human interface problem.

The Problems with Brand Research

Researchers are bound to run into several issues, and try as you may you cannot predict unpredictability. Human beings have an uncanny knack of quitting stereotypical actions just as the latest consumer study has mapped the generation’s current trends. What are you going to do? Consumers are after all, human. Reactivity is a familiar old problem any MBA student learns about on their first day of research collection. It’s just that they choose to forget about it when they enter a larger system. The famous Hawthorne effect, is a case in point.

So, why do marketer’s insist on using the same old research solution for every single problem? I think the answer lies in a story thought up by the brilliant Dr. William Newcomb – Newcomb’s Paradox. Take a moment to read the story, it’s short, sweet and confounding as hell. And I think it explains all that a marketer needs to know about human nature. We are undeniably objectively (perceiving?) creatures. We objectify everything, including space and time. What do you think a drunkard would say, if you asked if he was a drunk?

To think that I am not going to think
of you anymore, is still thinking of you.
Let me then try not to think
that I am not going to think of you

- Zen Saying / Anonymous

I’ve often considered that a better way to make certain decisions about branding is through known behaviour. Campaigns that don’t underestimate their audiences always seem to work better. Despite the fact that I’ve been told by clients in the past that ” Tone it down for audiences in Kanchanpur” it’s brand campaigns that break the rules that also break the sales records.

How People Function

The reason behind this is the way people function. New research about the way consciousness functions consistently shows that popular psychological terms such as memory, association and repression are not the  clear cut black and white terms we thought them to be. Conciusness seems to be a moment to moment phenomena. A metaphor of a miner’s helmet with a flashlight seems apt here. When a person becomes involved with the object of his attention, it’s like the spotlight holds the object in view and nothing else. When the shift in attention occurs, it is again completely absorbed in the object of it’s attention.

These bring up interesting points for discussion especially on what we assume about brand perception and brand recall. For instance viewed from this new viewpoint brand recall becomes much more dependant on a system of holding the viewers attention rather than just attracting it. These therefore requires brand artefacts that are well planned and integrated into the environment.

Here is a simple example.

Say a global pharma major wishes to organise an event aimed at pharma stores and is looking to create branding and environmental design for the event. Now if the venue is the ball room of a 5 star hotel, it is imperative that the company temporarily transform s the space into an environment condusive for the retention of brand messages.

This is impossible if the brand manager pulls out that tired out checklist of logo, brochure, poster and backdrop. Instead the manager should prototype or flowchart the event and look for points where the customer will make contact with the brand. Once these points are established the manager should speak wit the design team on the best way to transform te environment. This can be done through corridor hangings, signage, installations, posters, lightshows… in fact, every aspect of the event’s branding can be controlled. The end effect is that the customer experiences exactly the same brand experience at the venue as he may expect from a controlled space such as a showroom or an office.

This integrated system allows brand managers to look at people as people and not statistical data. As you may have read in an earlier article, the difference between knowing how and knowing that can make all the difference in the positive perception of your brand.

Well well well… so RK Swamy has succumbed to the templates craze. The venerable old agency has started a templates portal for companies that cannot afford developing concepts from scratch. HRdirectiononline.com allows HR depts. to download advertising for as low as Rs.4000 to apparently deploy HR communications faster than ever before. They project profits of almost 100 crores from the venture.

Now we sit back and wait for surgeons to pass on scalpels to patients willing to operate on themselves. For a nominal cost anesthetic too will be provided. Just a matter of time, really.

The Nestle Chocolate Museum,

from noncicredo

Spotted a cool Macdonals ad at Brainstorm9. This billboard uses the shadow to point what time it is to eat what. cool.

Yup. That’s exactly what VW’s Eos Shadow Poster does. here. The team figured who’d do a better job than the sun?

So, what is facebook upto really? It’s cool to see a networking app set the world on fire, but after the intial few times the software tried profiling me, I got a little irritated. Recently facebook sent an invite to advertisers and ad agencies in New York a lucite brick with this carved on it.

“You are invited to a discussion with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team as we unveil a new way of advertising online.”

The event is scheduled for Nov this year. Wonder what that is all about.  Read more about it here.