Naked hires psychologist to help drive consumer insights
Naked Communications has hired the agency’s third psychologist, Brooke Ward, previously a research fellow at Deakin University.
Brooke Ward
Adam Ferrier, Naked consumer psychologist and founding partner, said: “There isn’t that much insight in this business, lots of stating the bleeding obvious with an enthusiastic power-point presentation – but not much genuine human insight.
“We are obsessed with ensuring we do communications that result in behavioural change, and psychologists learn scientifically validated frameworks that help us not only understand, but predict human behaviour.”
Insight is more art than science. I’m yet to meet a psychologist (reductionist and mechanistic trained thinkers) with an original insight not out of a text book or based on a pathology. Sure you can packaged it up with some “enthusiastic power-point” and make it look good but.
@Adro
Wasn’t Einstein a reductionist?
Naked cricket. Finally the ladies will tune in!
No, integrative and holistic….his best ideas came from day dreams not logic and thinking about the big picture.
Here is a quote from Einstein’s 1905 black body radiation or ‘Light Quantum’ paper that he won his Nobel prize for. Please respond with a quote from a marketing psychology report that is more reductionist.
3. On the Entropy of the Radiation
The following considerations are contained in a famous paper
by Mr. W. Wien and are only mentioned here for the sake of
completeness.
Consider radiation which takes up a volume v. We assume that
the observable properties of this radiation are completely deter-
mined if we give the radiation energy p(v) for all frequencies.t
As we may assume that radiations of different frequencies can be
separated without work or heat, we can write the entropy of the
radiation in the form
S = VIO* (NP, V)
dv,
where 4 is a function of the variables p and v. One can reduce cf,
to a function of one variable only by formulating the statement
that the entropy of radiation between reflecting walls is not
changed by an adiabatic compression. We do not want to go into
this, but at once investigate how one can obtain the function 4
from the radiation law of a black body.
If the temperature of a black-body radiation in a volume u = 1
increases by dT, we have the equation
or, as a4/ap is independent of V:
dS = !
? dE.
aP
As dE is equal to the heat transferred and as the process is
reversible, we have also
1
dS = 2 dE.
T
Through comparing, we get
84- 1
ap T*
—
This is the black-body radiation law. One can thus from the
woah
@PeterW—a bit off topic, albeit you hammered home your point.
Personally, I don’t think physics and psychology are quite the same thing, as much as many would like to think it is. perhaps down at a sub-quantum-level, there will invariably be links between all sciences, but that’s still now a work in progress.
Powerpoint presentations are always good to impress bored execs in a meeting, especially if their own IT skills don’t reach those dizzying heights.
@peter williams….very dull and you missed the point….you can only cut something up into smaller bits if you see the whole first
i reckon it’s the right approach … would much prefer to listen to a psychologist than a hysterical rambling ‘strategist’ telling me the sky is falling.
we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!
Will clients also lie on a lounge for agency meetings?
All Psychology does is package complex human constructs, such as behaviour, into neat little constructs so that they are easy to understand, can be used in research and used to predict human behaviour. Most psychological research gathers information from “real people” – it just surveys a lot of them at once or interviews them and then summarises these findings into an easy to understand way. For example, “conscientiousness” is a construct that is used a lot in personality research – but underneath that construct is a number of different behaviours – such as always getting somewhere on time, organises time etc. Conscientiousness has been found to be a good predictor of job performance (just after cognitive ability) so if you are looking for a new person to fill a role you will ask them or give them a valid and reliable questionnaire about conscientiousness. So instead of flying blind – Psychology gives the job hirer a construct to focus on when judging a new job applicant and knows that this construct is a good predictor of job performance (based on research).
As a marketer who has an undergrad degree in psychology and post-grad in marketing, I think this is a very good step in the right direction.
I think there is a danger of marketing taking what I would loosely call ‘pop psychology’ as fact.
For example, I remember in my marketing classes being taught Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as if it was fact. However in psychology, and even the ‘reliable’ source of Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.....y_of_needs – under ‘Criticisms’ ), although it sounds like a good logical idea, there is little to no evidence that this happens in real life. I think this is a good example as to why a greater level of scientific accountability is required in marketing.
“we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!”
Mike – I thought Baxter had gone?
Boom tish!