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You don’t get far in life without a bit of communication.  And for marketers communication is the byword for success.

 

Guest post by Alex Batchelor, chairman of The Marketing Society

 

The problem with communication, between two parties or many, is that it requires codes.  All parties code and decode, sometimes with different levels of understanding and certainly with their own individual versions of the code book.  Some things almost all people communicate very accurately – like the expressions on human faces – and others are coded/decoded by much smaller groups, like the number of Cornish speakers.

Decoding the messages

Similarly, autism is sometimes described as an inability to code and decode emotion – an inability to recognise emotion in the faces and behaviour of others and sometimes an inability to display those emotions in ways that are easily understood by others.  Many of these codes are so well learned that they require little thought (we do not consciously process the expressions on peoples’ faces) – but some require real effort (think about a conversation in a foreign language that you do not speak fluently).

“What has any of this got to do with marketing?” I hear you cry. Well, we learn the codes for communication by copying. Indeed the smartest heuristic approaches to any problem often involve copying – but we deliver improvement by both copying and changing.  If you are a marketer then the same is true – you need to learn to copy but you also need to know how to copy and improve.

Fluffy patience

All of which brings us to Walter Mischel.  Many of you will already know about the marshmallow experiment, a concept surmised in an excellent piece entitled “Don’t”, by Jonah Lehrer; the extract of which was featured in the New Yorker a year ago.

What is important about the marshmallow experiment is the learning that they are continuing to build on.  As individuals in a society our success correlates strongly with our ability to delay gratification – and as parents the lesson is to encourage our children to wait and also to make the waiting worthwhile.

My distilled learning from all of the work of Daniel Kahneman or Walter Mischel, two of the fathers of behavioural economics is this. To copy and improve and to learn to delay gratification – and you are never going to do any of that without a boundless optimism.

(Optimism is the word in semaphore)

 

Alex is also the COO of innovative online insights agency, BrainJuicer

 

Edited by Simon Lewis | Only Marketing Jobs

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