The human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer.

Where can we find some intellectual street cred and big brain support for our beloved discipline, experiential marketing? It is with keen insights and modern truths we can see and prove that the human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer—that experience drives all perception and opinion forming.

It is with great thanks (and enduring apologies) to Jonah Lehrer that I have done a mash-up of his great work, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, and our beloved discipline, experiential marketing. Briefly:

Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew that 1) smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual. Scientists didn’t establish these facts until a few years ago, yet Proust made the point in 1913.

Smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations.

As we continue to learn more and more about the brain’s complex chemistry, we should – as experiential marketers – help our clients understand the primacy of the impact consumers will experience when they are addressed head-on in a sensory capacity. In fact, this bit says it all:

Proust’s goal in Remembrance of Things Past is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory.

This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.”

Establish the memories, then we can tinker.

Memories are not immutable as Herz and others have found; rather, they change as we remember them. I believe the key in experiential marketing is to first ESTABLISH the memories. We can then tinker with the nuance via social media and ad campaigns, but without base-line experiences to “fiddle with” we cannot gain serious ground in the consumer’s mind.

To me these are enlightenments equal to – if not more powerful than – ROI models. The discoveries of modern neuroscience, combined with the insights of these great thinkers, show that demonstration is king…that stimulating the senses is the coin of the realm in creating real, lasting memories…resulting in converted customers.

Enjoy Proust Was A Neuroscientist if you are so inclined. It’s a nice visit with Woolf, Stein, Escoffier, Stravinsky and of course Proust…our experiential forefathers.

Like you, I do my marketing homework.  I keep up with industry pubs, must-attend seminars, über-hip “expert” ad execs, cool school, Gladwell, Bob Garfield, Bob’s blog, your blog, etc.  The plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact is enlightening, it really is, but who can keep up with it all?  In an effort to simplify our lives as experiential marketers, brand stewards and idea-generators, I’d like to propose an experiment of sorts.

I contend that everything we need to know about marketing, branding, and getting to great ideas has already been surmised by two people born over a century apart but united by their mutual distaste for monotony, monogamy and prison. Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton have done a damned good job of generating axioms about life that are applicable to marketing – and easier to digest than the next must-read Fast Company book-of-the-month.

So here’s what I propose: skip reading What The Dog Saw and Baked.  It’s okay, people.  Really.  Let’s take a short break – a Nestea plunge if you will – from all the marketing intelligence surrounding us.  It will all be waiting for us tomorrow.

Today let’s run our marketing efforts through the WildeParis Experiment.  Sound kinky?  Here’s how it works:  simply see if the idea you are thinking about pitching or buying fulfills upon all or most of the following list of quotes – marketing axioms, as I like to call them.

The following lines are quotes from Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton. Have fun guessing who said what (click on the quote to see who said it), but that’s not the point of the experiment.  The point is to take a break from the plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact, and simplify what you need to know to deem an idea great.  Here we go.

“There is no sin worse in life than being boring.”

Go ahead; be honest with yourself when assessing your work.  Do you like the idea? Love the idea?  Are you passionate about it? You know if it’s boring. If you don’t…you’re boring.

“I can resist everything except temptation.”

That’s what we do for a living; we tempt.  Is your idea irresistible?  Is your story tempting?

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Look, there’s a lot of money being wasted on marketing shit nobody cares about, notices or talks about. There are many, many examples, and I don’t want to be cruel, but consider this.  Almost every brand seems to believe they need a website, right?  And I agree, most brands do. But have you ever visited the black, depressing, corporate, empty, pointless hole that is macys.com, walmart.com, century21.com, aa.com? AA.com is American Airlines, not Alcoholics Anonymous; their site, aa.org, is pretty good.  Anyway, the list of grotesquely expensive, meaningless, never-talked-about marketing goes on and on.  And it is the worst thing in the world.

“There’s nobody in the world like me. I think every decade has an iconic blonde – like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”

Homogeneity abounds.  Brands and marketers alike are too often risk-averse, and without risk — intelligent risk — there is no innovation.  I give out Failure Awards at the agency to recognize those who embrace risk to achieve something great, truly creative and original.  Without risk, your brand is just another pair of khaki pants in a button down shirt, hiding behind a laminated desk, waiting for the clock to strike 5 so it can rush home in its minivan to a plastic house in the suburbs.  But if your brand is consistently taking inspired risks and sometimes failing, you become something original or, on rare occasions, iconic.

“When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong.”

Embrace a culture of friction and passionate discourse.  Never hire your doppelganger. Fire every “yes” man in your organization.  If you don’t, you’ll never have a great idea.

“I don’t have sex unless I’m in a relationship. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to that. I really am!”

Consumers want to have relationships with real, committed brands like Mountain Dew, not blowup dolls like (insert your favorite poseur brand).  Know what your brand is.  Know what it isn’t. Commit to it.  Not everyone needs to like your brand, and your brand doesn’t need to sleep with everyone; we’re not in high school.

To get a consumer into bed you need to know them.  Know who they really are.  Love them.  Eat fast food with them.  Play Halo with them.  Ride scooters, walk dogs, go shopping at Wal-Mart (yes you, go to Wal-Mart), watch obscure movies, eat fish heads, wear latex body suits…do whatever your demo does.  Here’s why: if you commit to what you are, you’ll never be a part of another lifeless brand and you’ll never garner lifeless results.  You’ll be in the hottest, sexiest relationship of your life.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

To support this point, I’ll break with consistency in the WildeParis Experiment, and take a look at what Seth Godin, the maestro of expert supposition/opinion/fact, has to say about consistency.  Or is it inconsistency?

Consistency
How can someone:
… be opposed to euthanasia but in favor of the death penalty?
… be in favor of the impeachment of Bill Clinton but not of George Bush?
… be worried about global warming but fly in a big private plane?
… be in favor of the impeachment of George Bush but not of Bill Clinton?
… be opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens but in favor of a pardon for Scooter Libby?
… be in favor of military intervention in Darfur but not in Iraq?
… be opposed to big government but want the government to control public speech?
… be in favor of banning medical marijuana but opposed to government regulation of cigarettes?
… be opposed to judicial meddling except in cases where you disagree with the current laws?

Easy. Because people aren’t consistent. Sure, you say, each of the above examples isn’t fair. They don’t match. They don’t line up. [Smart people are lucky: they can hold seemingly contradictory ideas in their head while they look more deeply into the facts and make good decisions... it’s called nuance.]

We don’t eat dessert because we’re on a diet but we put blue cheese dressing on our salad. We don’t pay extra for first class but we refuse to give up a seat to get bumped from a flight, even though the reward is a thousand dollars. We curse the spam that clutters our e-mail boxes but turn around and authorize millions of pieces of junk mail to go out to support our new business.
The local hardware store owner curses the existence of Home Depot but buys his family’s clothes at Wal-Mart. The vegetarian wears a leather belt…

Everything is a special situation; everything begs for inconsistency. If all we did was market to computers, life would be a lot simpler, but a lot less interesting.

So, there it is: the WildeParis Experiment.  It may not be perfect but it’s certainly a reprieve from all the expert supposition, opinion and fact.  Give it a try and let me know how it turns out!