Marketing and Behavioral Economics
I came across an interesting article this morning about the current state of Advertising and Marketing over on Campaign.
In recent years, marketing's models of human behaviour have been mostly naive or self-interested. Every discipline (advertising, DM, online, sales promotion, PR, design) has simply created a model of human persuasion designed to suit whatever proxy measure their own discipline moves most.
In many cases I agree. I have seen a lot of folks who think that printing an advertisement with a celebrity in Hudson jeans will make people buy the product, when people are really not that dumb. The article also references the book Nudge, which my mom actually recommended to me about a year ago as well, stating that by implementing behavioral economics into advertising would yield better and more tangible results.
Without a coherent world view, it is now assumed that the only way to grow an agency is at the expense of another agency; the only way to grow a discipline is at the expense of another discipline; the only way one medium can grow is at the expense of another.
