Free Blog Two

I couldn’t think of anything to write this blog over, so I decided to watch the Michael Shermer Podcast and I’m glad that I did. He made a lot of great points about science, intelligence, and theory that I thought wouldn’t relate to marketing.

As a Led Zeppelin fan I liked the back-tracked Stairway to Heaven segment too. I picked up on the Satan part at first, but when he put up the supposed backwards lyrics I could make myself hear every word since that is what my mind wanted me to hear. I have tried to spin Zeppelin IV backwards on my turntable before but could never get it perfect at 33 rpm. I also thought the images of the Virgin Mary and the smiley face on Mars were interesting too, and this brings me to the point where I relate this to marketing. As consumers we are too trusting and should be more skeptical. Often, like the images and Stairway demonstrations we believe what we are told without testing for ourselves. A real-world example of this would be Tide detergent; supposedly it cleans clothes better and most consumers believe this without testing for themselves. I have always used Tide since it is included in my care packages, but I really don’t know if it cleans better; in fact I likely couldn’t tell the difference between clothes washed in Tide or the leading store brand. Procter and Gamble and the bottle tell me that it cleans better, so like most consumers I believe it. This is true for a lot of different products but Tide stuck out to me.

I also found the part on intelligence increasing three points every decade interesting too. This seems to be true, but after watching the Podcast maybe I should be more skeptical about it. If the average IQ is 100 now that means in 100 years the average person will be considered a genius by today’s standards. When put in a time perspective 100 years is not too long considering the universe is 13.7 billion years old. This brings me to yet another marketing insight: if the average person is a genius in 100 years, will marketing also adapt at this rate to be able to reach customers at the genius level? Some thought on the topic lends to the idea that if the general population is increasing at this rate then most college-educated marketers will adapt at the same rate as well and marketing as a function will be able to adapt too. This is really interesting considering marketing has adapted so much since the 1950’s, but adding the aspect of marketing to geniuses makes it seem more difficult. If most of the consumers are at this intellectual level they might be able to see through some of the thin marketing tactics and analyze things more themselves.

As I said earlier, when I first started to watch this Podcast I thought, “yeah, it’ll be ok to get through the assignment,” but I am glad that I ended up watching it. It was interesting to realize the history of thought behind Saturn having rings, which most second-graders know today to be a fact, when some of the most historic intellectuals of the day battled with the idea. I agree with Shermer that both good theory and science must be combined and one without the other usually leaves questions, but no answers. In my opinion this has been one of the more interesting Podcasts, not to say that the others were boring, but this one really resonated with me and I believe I was able to draw some insights from it. The insights might be more marketer-based than customer-based but in the end both end up almost mingled together.