I try to make a habit of going back to books I have read in the past to revisit information and ideas and make sure I haven’t lost too much of what I once knew. It was in that spirit that I recently pulled an old book on learning theory off the shelf and was struck by a passage in the introduction. I’ll quote the entire paragraph here, to provide fuller context, but it was the final sentence and part of the second-to-last sentence that struck me:
How does learning take place? What factors determine what we will learn and how rapidly we will learn it? There are innumerable people in situations in which it would be useful to have answers to these questions. We think at once of students looking for better methods of study, of teachers wanting to improve their classroom techniques, and of people in industry seeking better ways of training new workers. We may also consider the mother looking for the best way of raising her children, the counselor trying to improve his client’s emotional and social adjustment, the animal trainer preparing seeing seeing-eye dogs for their work, and the advertiser trying to develop a preference on the part of the consumer for his client’s product. In all of these cases, knowledge about the learning process represents power. [2]*
I would replace “advertiser” with “marketer,” or better yet “strategist,” but nonetheless, I find it remarkable that this passage was (a) published in 1963, and (b) we still don’t tend to think of the buying process as a learning process to the degree that you might think we would at this point.
Of course, marketing that teaches is a big part of what we are about here at Tagoras, but we recognize that we are hardly serving a mass market with this idea. The idea that consumers want and need to be educated has been around for a long time – as this passage suggests – but relatively few organizations embrace the “teaching sells” approach in a wholehearted and sophisticated fashion.
My bet is that we will be seeing more and more organizations embrace this approach in the very near future as a way to grow their markets. In other words, it’s going to be increasingly important to ask “How does learning take place for my customers?” – and to respond accordingly.
- JTC
P.S. – If you like what you read here on the Tagoblog, we’d really appreciate it if you would subscribe to the RSS feed.
*Learning: A Survey of Psychological Interpretations by Winfred F. Hill
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
