What's Important?

As an advertising strategist, I have a strange window on humanity--the two-way mirror of the focus group room. I sit on one side, in the dark. On the other side, people of all types, ages, sexes, sizes talk about ads and products. We ask whether the photo of the middle aged woman in this ad is "relevant". Or if the brochure we are planning to write is hefty enough to be "important". Thanks to trends and fashions, all of this learning is about as eternal and profound as dust in the wind.


Yet after twenty years lurking in the darkened back room, combing through surveys and dissecting research reports, it has finally occurred to me that I was searching for something that actually matters. No matter what I am researching, as a strategist I always want to understand what's important to people. And that's a profound question.


If you watch people's faces as they react and discuss ads (eew! yessss! *yawn*), you soon realize that people bring their full humanity to every decision, no matter how concrete or obvious their reasons are on the surface. Nonetheless, experts in advertising psychology have distilled the rich spectrum of human motivations down to short lists that include things like sex, self-esteem, self-preservation, and greed. Did I mention sex?


Maybe this is basically true, but it's also hopelessly reductionist. (It's easy to boil the soup until there's nothing but brown goop left, too, but you won't learn much about soup that way.) And from my personal point of view, it's sadly dismissive of the actual lives and concerns of all of the individual human beings I've been watching through the mirror all these years. What if you or I were on the other side of the mirror? Would we want our voices to be heard as the grunts and screeches of primitive impulse?


I've watched young people talk about buying their first car and though self-esteem was obviously a big part of that experience, so was everything from childhood memories to their dreams of having children of their own. I've watched older people in the last stages of crippling illness talk about how they manage their conditions and though they certainly still care about self-preservation, they could also teach every one of us about endurance, dignity, and humor.


So this blog isn't about the useful reductions and formulations common in my industry. It's about what I've actually learned about people throughout the years. It isn't scientific, because I am not a scientist. Call it a diary of revelations granted to me by my fellow beings; my personal antidote to the cynicism of the marketplace.