A rational basis for marketing?

Can we learn how it really works under the surface?

[JayCee]

Been reading a book on the the '2nd Law of Thermodynamics'. Sounds dry I know, but it's actually a good read and almost a religious experience - learning how the cosmos really works, on a deep and fundamental level.

So now, I'm seeing things a little differently and wondering what deep basic principles might be at work in marketing?

Insight brings power and control, as I've seen in other disciplines where engineering was brought to bear on formerly "black art" practices, in wonderful ways, (I'm thinking of the Audio Engineering of large sound systems, which I used to do for Jefferson Starship music tours).

Can we pool our resources or ideas for some research into this?

All I have to share so far is a Scientific American article in the February 2001 issue called "Persuasion". It looked at the social phenomena used in advertising and described 6 basic tendencies of human behavour that sellers use:
1. Reciprocation
2. Consistency
3. Social Validation
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity
(couldn't find this at the sciam.com site though)

Anyone else have any resources, citations, books to recommend, etc?

Maybe we can help each other to a better understanding of what works and why.

[CromeYellow]

Hey Jaycee

Those topics from Scientific American are from a fantastic book called 'Influence' by Robert Cialdini. It is a seminal marketing book.

As for 'deep principles' at work in marketing, I reckon you need to look no further than emotion.

Most people buy based on how they feel, and rationalise afterwards.

In addition, a great recent study showed that the human's perception of pain is relative. i.e. if pain is increasing, it is perceived as worse than pain that is constant, even if the constant pain is at a higher level than the increasing pain.

In marketing terms, this means that if you sign up for a service which initially is great, then the quality falls off, you will tend to perceive that as worse than if it had always been poor.

This is also down to, I think, most peoples' dislike of being conned!

Let me know if you come up with any more good stuff in this area.

Cheers

Cy

P.S. 'The Tipping Point' is a great new book of psychological principles in marketing and ties in nicely with Seth Godin's 'Ideavirus'.

[chiyo]

To get a little less scientific, an old advertising sage once told me that sccessful advertising has to appeal to at at least one of the seven deadly sins...

in order of potency..

Pride
Greed
Envy
Wrath
Lust
Gluttony
Sloth

Funnily enough a well known credit company started sending me weekly brocures to get me to sign up and surpise or surpise each brochure focused on one deadly sin from 1 to 6. The first was all about how important i would feel, the second was on all the prizes and specials iid get, the third talked about what other card holders were getting already, the forth featured gals in bikinis etc etc.

Never needed any other guide to write advertising copy since! Though I did add "Guilt" later one for my own personal eight..

[edited by: chiyo at 2:07 am (utc) on June 6, 2002]

[Dpeper]

Im gonna go with chiyo on that one ;)

[JayCee]

Thanks all.
Good stuff!

Was wondering what might be learned by taking a physicist's point of view and thinking about deeper principles than just human psychology.

Maybe by going outside most marketing theories, which I assume only address human psychology, we could do some "thinking outside the box" and come up with fresh insights.

I love the comments so far, but what about looking beyond human psychology to say, Chaos Theory, Entropy (2nd Law of Thermdynamics), Complexity Theory, etc.

Hope to see more marketing theories here though, whatever their kind.

Do you have a theory underlying your efforts to "make things happen" on the web?