Communication lies at the heart of marketing and Lincoln is its benchmark. He could have invented the law of advertising called K.I.S.S.––Keep It Simple Stupid! Look at his introduction to the Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." In only one brilliant sentence he framed his entire presidency and gave meaning to the civil war and the loss of lives at Gettysburg.
Can you write one sentence that frames your entire reason for being a veterinarian and gives meaning to the daily activities at your hospital? It should be a lot easier task than Lincoln's––right? Sure. Just try it.
Arguably, Charle's Darwin's "Origin of Species" equals or exceeds the bible as the most influential book ever written. As a marketer, I am keenly interested in human behavior and what motivates us, what makes us feel good and bad. How we came to be what we are teaches us a lot about why we act the way we do.
For example, thanks to Darwin, we can track the development of the human brain from the simple Crocodile brain, a lump at the end of the spinal column, to the mammalian Dingo brain that grew around the Crocodile brain, and finally the human brain with its deeply convoluted cerebral cortex. The crocodile brain is not a thinking machine, it is a simpler machine totally dedicated to survival, killing, eating and mating. The dingo brain adds the limbic system with its ability to store and act on memories and its ability to have feeling. The human brain with its 100 billion neurons and thousands of billions of synaptic connections adds a massive computer for logical thought and reflection as well as the crown jewels of music, mathematics, speech, literature.
As magical the human brain is, it must be remembered that each of us still possesses the crocodile and dingo brain hiding underneath all that in-folded gray matter. And thanks to the corpus collosum and other parts of the brain, all three brains spend a lot of time talking to each other without our even knowing it. Why is this important to me as a marketer?
Even though we are very good at justifying our behaviors with highly rational explanations, the truth is that most of our decision making is driven by a crocodilian compulsion to survive and mate (to "win") as well as the dingo's compulsion to pursue that which makes it feel good. As a marketer, I am more interested in why humans actually make purchasing decisions than why they "think" they are making the decisions.
If you think that clients are going to choose you because of the highly rational reason that you are a great doctor, you are sadly mistaken. They are going to choose you or another because of the way they perceive you and how that perception "feels." In other words, the crocodile and the dingo hiding within each of us governs our purchasing decisions a lot more than all of those millions of logical thoughts busily zipping around our cerebral cortex. Imagine how long every simple decision would take if we had to first consider every logical choice available to our human brains!
Charles Darwin was the first to open the door to understanding the origin of this species we know as human.
When it comes to your marketing, remember Lincoln and Darwin: feed the crocodile, pet the dingo and Keep It Simple Stupid!
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