HEAD TRIPS

Deadheads, we’re not (though we admit to loving that music).

But how to figure out what’s in consumer (or stakeholder) brains when they buy?

Some of our recent op-eds have dealt with sub-sets of the new ‘neuromarketing,’ from eye scans to facial coding.

That’s only part of understanding how we make decisions.  What our advertising and marketing colleagues are advocating is a holistic take on uncovering the reasons behind our behaviors.  In fact, they’re doing more than talking about it; they’re actively looking at subconscious perceptions, studying real-life actions, and field testing, in addition to ferreting out physiological clues.

Obama’s academic consultants are credited with the ‘gotta delve deeper’ movement.  Yet way back in 1915, J.Walter Thompson hired John B. Watson for market research (the U of Chicago co-founder of behavioral psych). 

Back to decisions:  Choosing A over B, say the scientists, is complicated.  Especially since 90 percent of our thinking occurs way below awareness levels.  It’s a meld of feelings versus thought, with our minds working at cross purposes during decision time.

But why can’t those of us in communications develop messages that appeal to the different parts of the brain (which is what our colleagues do, in absence of large budgets and loads of time)?  It’s the intuitive versus the deliberate, the fast versus slow, the effortless versus the planful.  No question, most of us are masterful in internal and external wordsmithing.  Isn’t it way past time we plot the appropriate ways to capture minds and hearts?

I'M BORED ...

It’s rare to hear this childhood plaint these days.*

Or is it?

What percentage of adult work these days is spent doing mindless stuff like expense accounts, surfing the Internet, or zoning out?

Simply put, those activities are our way of expressing boredom.

Or are they?

Today, more and more psychologists are advocating that we give our brains some downtime to improve mental health and allow ideas to incubate.  After all, they point out, Archimedes discovered the ‘volume parity’ principle while bathing.  Sir Paul McCartney composed the “Yesterday” tune in his sleep.  Of late, the media is zeroing in on Americans’ propensity to not take vacations, noting that 61 percent of us work during our time off and, in 2013, each of us banked five unused vacation days.

Do those facts and figures point to our compulsive busynesses, powered by technology?  Our guilt if there’s nothing to do?  Or to behaviors that the workplace and, often, state of the economy seem to mandate?

We’d say ‘all of the above.’  The idea of doing nothing might be anathema.  On the other hand, what better place to start unthinking than at work?  See it now:  Five-minute think breaks every so many hours.  Coffee (and tea) interludes without staring at anything.  Electronics unplugging once a day for x number of minutes.

Stop.  Pause.  Breathe.  Create.

*We’ll guarantee you’ll never have to hear Mom’s rejoinder:  “Go hit your head against a wall, then.”

A NEW-FASHIONED CANDY STORE

Announcements of new mobile and Web-like tools come almost daily, it seems. 

Sometimes, it’s old stuff in tech format, like our childhood’s Viewmaster® collection of reels and hand-held viewer.  [Thank you, Mattel.]

Other times, it’s a brand-new spin for ageless concepts, such as flash cards made digital.

No matter what, though, we get jazzed about the novelty – and pondering ways that we might use this software to great impact.

Take flash cards, for instance.  They were pre-school mainstays, helping us learn our ABCs and numbers and names of items.  Today, programs like Anki, Cerego, and Memrise not only jolt our memories, but also make our knowledge much longer lasting.  [Confession:  Which is how we got through college chem courses …] 

What’s more, researchers have proven that there’s something to these spaced-repetition tactics – i.e., fixing information in our brains through repeated exposure at planned intervals.  Students get better grades.  Memorizing is less onerous.  Even exposures to difficult foreign languages like Mandarin stick … somewhat better.

Imagine, for instance, salespeople drilled on products and pricing and spiffs.  Or the smartphones of new hires embedded with this software and info on the company, its strategy, history, vision and mission.  And the litany of human resources programs instantly recalled via visual images and quick blurbs.

Hmmm:  Candy retailers are so non-PC.  Shall we call it, ‘acting like kids in the Apple store’?

REQUIEM FOR A [NEWS] LEADER?

Was Brian Williams’ demotion the death knell for anchorpeople?

Or does it symbolize (as we believe) how thin the claims of credibility and authenticity can be?

Think with us here.  Ever since Walter Cronkite earned the CBS anchorman sobriquet in the early 1950s, we used to regard our news readers as serious professionals, men (for the most part) who earned their authenticity in the trenches, reporting first-hand on serious and important stories.  That opinion continued to be fostered by the late Peter Jennings and the Huntley-Brinkley duet.  Fairly recently, though, the perception of anchor-folks waffled between entertainment and news; the buzz, in short, became more critical than the news.  And credibility zeroed out. 

In a sense, that TV contract of confidence between viewers and news readers is somewhat akin to the unspoken bond between employees and their corporate leaders.  Parallels abound:  Breaking news is a hard-won prize by skilled reporters.  Delivering information about workplace and corporate changes must also be a task assumed by the C-suite, provided straightforwardly yet with a sense of humane-ness.  Another:  We highly respect sector expertise, say, the political know-how of a David Todd or the late Tim Russert.  The same holds true for business chieftains who are not afraid to tell us the truth accurately, seriously, and relay what it means to us.

We could go on (and just might, later).  In your opinion, dear reader, which CEOs are today’s ‘most trusted (wo)men in America” – and why?