A School of Thought: Gillian Rightford in Conversation with Neil Higgs
Neil Higgs is a veteran statistician, who has developed a new course and new framework to help marketers understand the why behind how people behave and what they do. Outline below.
Link to the course: https://theschoolofthought.co/spaces/12645376?utm_source=manual
Link to his book on Understanding Numbers: Ceteris Parabis;
https://payhip.com/b/V9Ubi
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Marketers, advertisers, communicators and policy-makers use a fairly common set of descriptors of the people to whom they wish to appeal. These are loosely termed “demographics” and generally consist of some or all of age, gender (not necessarily, but possibly, sex), educational level, home and other languages, life-stage, occupation, location and some measure of wealth. Marketing strategies may be framed in these terms, or in combinations of these variables along with, sometimes, some attempt at “psychographics” (their attitudes, interests, personality, values, goals and lifestyles).
Generally, marketing and communication outcomes are tracked mostly in terms of such demographics: but very seldom at a psychographic level and very seldom with any real understanding of the human being at the focus of this energy. Of course, this may not be true in the ad creative business (a well- known creative director once showed me how to walk in the moccasins of those to whom you wish to appeal) but it is certainly how things are tracked.
This approach has been influenced by consumer models that posit rationality as the basis of communication processing and decision-making – a classic example is the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) approach which sounds perfectly reasonable, but is now known to ignore the reality of how human-beings – not “consumers”- actually operate.
This course seeks to outline a more appropriate approach to understanding how marketing and communicating works by moving from a consumer-led model to a people-led framework. This implicitly understands that people live in their own reality bubble (think a snow globe) which arises from their basic humanity, and their accident of birth in the first instance, and then explicitly notes how subsequent events and choices circle back and change what is in that bubble. In turn, this affects the way people interact with the outside world.
The framework outlines a set of measures that are relevant, short and easy to implement in order to understand the people with whom one wishes to communicate. How to determine where people fall in terms of these measures is explicitly provided. An action outline is provided.
