Nobody Knows Anything

I seem to get all my best insights about marketing while thinking about things that (seemingly) have nothing to do with marketing — while watching The Sopranos, or reading Allen Ginsberg or Matt Ridley, or listening to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, or looking at a Picasso. I tend to arrive at epiphanies in this way as much, if not more than when I sit around and think directly about marketing. It's just the way my brain works.

I suspect that it is also the way Andy Havens's brain works, although I hesitate to speculate about what might actually take place in those dark corridors. Andy is a marketing guru who not long ago "retired" from one of my favorite listservs, in reaction to years of frustration trying to make lawyers "get it" about marketing. Now Andy has a new blog, TinkerX, in which he recently caught my eye with a post about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This principle of quantum physics, also known as the Principle of Indeterminacy, is something I (and a lot of people) have thought about for years, not only in a scientific context, but how it might apply to our understanding of other phenomena, including marketing. I am not going to try to explain it. Andy does a decent job of that, but since all sort of very bright people still argue about what it means and what it doesn't mean, don't expect to solve the riddle single-handedly.

I told Andy that my own interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle and how it might apply to marketing is closer to that of screenwriter William Goldman's famous assessment of Hollywood and the movie business: Nobody knows anything.

Comments

[Michelle Golden]

AH! Thank you so much Mark for posting about Andy's new blog. I'm an AH fan of grand proportions and greatly missed his musings.

Looking forward to meeting you at BlawgThink...your intro on the attendee circ. was highly amusing and readily caught my attention!