The INTERCONNECTED

Marketing isn’t simple. The problem is we all desperately want it to be.

So we try to make the discipline into a science. All that’s done is turn everything into an argument about who’s right and who’s wrong.

We’ve done brand versus performance, penetration versus loyalty, distinctiveness versus differentiation. Now it’s AI versus human.

The closest we get to wisdom is saying the answer is both. But that isn’t the real answer and deep down we know it.

Proper science is properly complex. It can catch out even the greatest minds.

Take quantum entanglement.

This is the idea that two particles that interact become permanently connected. Measuring one instantly determines the other, regardless of distance. They share a ‘quantum state’, as if they were still one thing.

It’s true that before you measure an entangled particle its properties are genuinely undetermined. But the moment you measure it, it chooses a definite state.

And instantaneously, its entangled partner resolves into the complementary state, whether that happens across the room, across the world or across the galaxy.

Einstein hated the theory. He called it “spooky action at a distance”.

The reason was, in his view, nothing should travel faster than the speed of light. Yet in quantum entanglement, if it were true, some kind of influence is happening in zero time.

So he spent years trying to prove it was a mistake. He was convinced that the particles must have had some hidden variables all along, like a pair of gloves in two separate boxes.

He was wrong. Entanglement is real. John Bell’s theorem in the 1960s and subsequent experiments have shown it to be true.

It’s just weird.

All of which suggests separateness is not the fundamental condition of things. Once a connection is formed, it persists.

But it’s also a reminder of how much of marketing is still a mystery. Why do people do what they do, in that particular situation, at that particular time?

So beware the simplifiers. Their hearts are in the right place but their heads have lost the plot.

They find patterns and insist they are laws. The answer is always in the book.

They are committed localists. Mental availability isn’t an outcome, it’s an objective. Don’t worry about why we remember what we remember.

Except it does all come back to motivation, the real but often invisible forces that drive behaviour. We’re never going to close the book on that.

So next time you’re faced with someone arguing a false binary, remember Einstein.

Maybe there is a connection between the two. Maybe the separation is an illusion.

If physics can learn this lesson, I think we can manage it in marketing.

It’s not that difficult.