Thinking of MARY

There’s the Mary in Frank Jackson’s thought experiment.

She’s the one who’s been locked in a black and white room her entire life. So she’s never seen a colour.

And yet she’s read everything there is to read about colour, the physics, biology and neuroscience of it. She’s the world’s expert on the subject.

Then one day Mary escapes and actually sees colour for the first time, a red rose.

The question is: does Mary learn anything new in experiencing that colour?

I don’t know about you but I would say yes. Of course she does.

Jackson’s point was there’s the knowing you get from reading and the knowing you get from experience. And you never really know something until you’ve lived it.

Marketing currently seems stuck in that black and white room.

We’ve reached a point when wisdom is someone parroting: ‘Ask not what a brand evokes, but what evokes a brand’. And everyone who’s read How Brand Grow nods along sagely.

By the way, that quote was actually the title of a 1992 paper by Holden & Lutz. None of this stuff is new.

But it’s led us to a point where all we read about now is Mental and Physical Availability, Category Entry Points and Distinctive Brand Assets.

Brands have been reduced to a logo, character or tagline. If a colour makes the list, it’s in its most meaningless form.

It all comes down to associative memory. Triggers and retrieval.

Then there’s another Mary, the one in Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen’s song of longing and hope.

All it takes is the harmonica at the beginning and I’m immediately there with the hundred times I’ve dropped the needle on side one of the album and the dozen or so occasions I’ve seen him play it.

The lyrics appear in a flash:

The screen door slams

Mary's dress sways

Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays

Roy Orbison's singing for the lonely

Hey that's me and I want you only

Don't turn me home again

I just can't face myself alone again

In the end, it’s about the chance of something real.

So Mary climb in

It’s a town full of losers

And I’m pulling out of here to win

All evoked by the sonic cue of that harmonica. A memory rebuilt in the moment, but only because it was waiting there in the first place.

So be careful about getting trapped in that black and white room. Experience isn’t everything with brands, but neither is salience.

The best place to start is with the truth, whether that lies in the product itself or elsewhere in the brand.

And for it to be true, it has to be felt.

Oh-oh come take my hand