Information Is Its Own Reward
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Our brains are wired to enjoy learning new information.
Digital marketing needs to be designed to feed this desire. Digital technology has created the most voracious information seeking entity mankind has ever seen. And the people who power it thrive on the exchange of new information. Monolithic campaigns with one idea that is repeated hundreds of times over across every possible channel die in this environment because the participants have nothing new to add to the conversation.
If you want two people to talk about your brand, they each need to bring something unique to the conversation. Otherwise the conversation runs into a dead end.
(Click for full size image)
An experiment by Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka has shown in primates that simply getting information can be as neurologically rewarding as getting a tangible reward like a drink of water.
Getting satisfaction from learning new information is innate to being human.
As Jonah Lehrer puts it:
Digital marketing needs to be designed to feed this desire. Digital technology has created the most voracious information seeking entity mankind has ever seen. And the people who power it thrive on the exchange of new information. Monolithic campaigns with one idea that is repeated hundreds of times over across every possible channel die in this environment because the participants have nothing new to add to the conversation.
If you want two people to talk about your brand, they each need to bring something unique to the conversation. Otherwise the conversation runs into a dead end.
An experiment by Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka has shown in primates that simply getting information can be as neurologically rewarding as getting a tangible reward like a drink of water.
Getting satisfaction from learning new information is innate to being human.
As Jonah Lehrer puts it:
These experiments elegantly demonstrate an essential feature of the human mind, which is how evolution bootstrapped our penchant for ideas to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites.
1 Comments:
Cool post Mike,
I guess the challenge is to make the message clear enough to be memorable (you don't want to "bury the lead"), but nuanced enough to foster communication between parties.
Love Lehrer's stuff.
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