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The Business of Belief: Why We Believe What We Believe in Business and Life

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1. The marketplace is deaf

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People need ideas, not information.

I've spent the better part of the past six weeks on the road presenting to senior level marketers, product and brand managers, sales executives, and owners of organizations of disparate size, industry, locale, and heritage.  Everything from Fortune 100 CPG companies to media and marketing firms, medical concerns and retail giants.  I've been doing a lot of talking.  But more importantly, I've been doing a lot of questioning, listening, and empathizing.  So what have I learned?

I've discovered that there are a lot of very bright, passionate people trying to help their customers and their organizations during these very challenging and stressful times. But . . . many of them are confused. The sheer amount of irrelevant and, in many cases, conflicting data and influences have caused their intellectual eyes to glaze over.  They fear digging deeper for they may hit an information main and drown in the resulting flood (e.g., today's Alltop marketing blog aggregation contains more than 1,300 posts). So, most continue to do pretty much what they've always done as a coping mechanism.  They continue to use ad hoc models to make sense and to make decisions.

In his latest book, Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, author and autistic savant Daniel Tammet writes:

"Many people lack a coherent worldview with which they can evaluate and assimilate new information. The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it. One possible explanation for this is the common confusion between information and ideas. In his book, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, history professor Theodore Roszak makes the point that the mind thinks with ideas, not information. Ideas are of primary importance because they define, make sense of, and create information. Roszak goes further still by arguing that the greatest ideas, such as the Founding Fathers' 'all men are created equal,' do not contain any information at all. Rather, such ideas are the result of an innate human sensibility that reaches beyond strings of data to recognize and synthesize transcendent patterns of thought. A personal worldview then helps put information back into perspective, giving it an intuitive place in our minds like the books in a library.

As a marketer, business owner, consultant, or executive, do you have a coherent worldview of today's marketplace?  Do you have a model that allows you to filter and make sense of new information, examples, and tools?  If so, I'd love to hear about it.  Because when I ask people to help me understand their rationale for particular decisions and activities, I typically hear rationalizations.

Take Twitter, the social networking service that allows users to send and read other users' short, text-based posts.  It's an extremely powerful tool that connects groups of people and enables information transfer in near real time.  I can think of hundreds of Twitter applications that would be relevant, meaningful and valuable to customers.  But when I ask people to explain precisely why they're Twittering, I typically hear something about their "number of followers."  Huh?

This meme about spreading messages and grabbing attention is where marketers are getting it all wrong.  Unless, of course, you're trying to create microcelebrity status and monetize the gained attention through speaking gigs, book deals, consulting engagements, blogvertising, et al.  Then have at it.  Flood the blogosphere and twitterverse with every thought, link, image and opinion that comes to your hyperactive mind.  Who knows?  People may just make you part of their subconscious media diet.

But if you're in business to add value to people's lives, especially stressed out and time-starved people, you should think twice before adding even a drop more information into the fire hoses they're presently drinking from.  Instead, help them synthesize transcendent patterns.  Help them make sense.  Help them achieve their goals and advance their agendas.  What people really need today are ideas, not information.  Ideas are the filters most people are so desperately lacking.

Posted February 25, 2009
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Comments

Tom,

Great post. Quite accurate observations. There's so much information out there that it can be totally overwhelming. But important, as you point out, is to take that information and translate it into real value through ideas. Which most people don't take the time to do. Just so much easier to simply lob the information out there.

Twitter is a very relevant example. I too find many who are running before they've really learned to walk. There seems to be more interest in being able to say that I "tweet" versus leveraging the tool to connect in more important and meaningful ways.

It's tough out there (no kidding). As always, ideas will be the only thing that saves the day.

Posted by: eric brody | February 26, 2009 at 07:58 AM

Nice post Tom. I'm going to Tweet about it :)

I believe that you are right - there is way too much information being added to the queue these days and a huge need for synthesis. (side note: Jim Lecinski from Google is working on this very concept of the need for SYNTHESIS vs. ANALYSIS).

On the other hand, though, I think it is equally important for folks to get their feet wet and embrace all the tools that are out there. In this day and age, to wait for it all to come together before experimenting can leave one left behind. When the internet first came about, there were lots of people doubting it's usefulness and lamenting the overload of unverified information - and now the newspapers of the world are going out of business...

Lots of nonsense on Twitter right now for sure, but there are those who are figuring out how to harness it through trial and error - and I think those people will likely have a distinct advantage in the days/weeks/months/years to come...The potential downside of adding more useless info may pale in comparison to the huge upside when one figures out how to do it right...

Posted by: Len Herstein | February 26, 2009 at 10:03 AM

Update - I tweeted about your post. Within a couple of minutes I got this reply from Nick Ehrman in Minnesota - I've never met the guy, just happened to be following my tweets:

"@lenherstein thanks for link to Asacker...its making me re-think some things."

Check him out at twitter.com/nehrman

There's something here for sure... :)

Posted by: Len Herstein | February 26, 2009 at 10:19 AM

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