What Newton Never Knew: the Physics of Insight
November 16, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
You can have the best product on the planet but if you do not properlly present and connect with your demgraphic your business will ultimately fail. Today's featured article comes from Adage.com and offers three common rules for connecting with the consumer. What are your thoughts? Can you think of a fourth rule? Tweet about it @seedingideas
Since marketers began to talk about consumer "insights," finding them has been a form of alchemy.
An insight is some truth about how your customers understand the world that makes your product meaningful to them. The better the insight, the more meaningful your product becomes, which drives your sales. But despite their importance, our thinking on insights has been more Yoda than Einstein.
That's all changing. Recent discoveries by cognitive scientists are poised to bring order to our pursuit of insights, and lay out the immutable laws of how the brain makes sense of the world. Much the way David Ogilvy and others broke down what works in creative, these laws will start to answer what works when it comes to finding the insights you need to build your business and your brands.
The First Law of Insight: Doing Is Knowing
The first major discovery concerns the relationship between your ideas and your physical experiences. Research has revealed that your brain is built to use interactions with the physical world -- like sensations of hot and cold, or the feeling of moving upwards or downwards -- to make sense of abstract ideas.
That's a heady concept, so here's an easy example. Your brain associates the physical experience of cleaning with ideas like morality and doing the right thing. Last year researchers proved this connection in dramatic fashion: they brought people into a room and told them that another participant in an adjacent room had sent them $4. And because that person sent them $4, the money had tripled, which means they now had $12. Their job was to decide how much money to send back to the stranger and how much to keep for themselves.
Seems pretty simple. But what they didn't tell the people in the experiment was that, for half of them, the researchers had sprayed one single spritz of citrus-scented Windex into the air in the room. When the research team went back to look at the results they found that folks who smelled the faint lemon-fresh scent sent twice as much money back to the person in the other room.
The first law of insight holds that beneath every idea is a physical experience. If you want real insight into the attitudes and opinions of your consumers, you must first discover the physical experiences on which they are built.
The Second Law of Insight: Seeing Is Doing, But Only if You've Done it Before
So, while the first law holds that you understand the world through your physical experiences with it, the second great discovery is that your brain can extend your physical experiences to everything you see and hear. In other words, you can have an experience without the specific experience.
