Rad’s commentary on The Five Minds reminded me of a post some time back from an industry colleague at Logic + Emotion. Though neither David D’Armano or myself can boast credentials as cognitive theory-psychology PHDs, I do think he makes a very good point on what it takes for creative marketers to succeed in our changing business:

The complexities of engaging marketing audiences, vs. “sellling”, and the need to design experiences vs. 2 dimensional graphic “skins” brings the demand on creative marketing (and in my view the creative satisfaction) to another level.

While the Five Minds concept is surely well researched and compelling (I suppose..haven’t yet read the book) , it feels awfully clean in it’s characterization of people. This is a mistake we’ve made on many occasions as marketers, treating people as segments not as unique individuals. To the extent where we communicate via scripted treatments, vs. intuitive dialogue.

So as technology and interactive marketing continues to develop, I’d be more curious to see how ALL sides of one’s thinking skills “converge”. Though not even close to scientific, one could argue that our technologies are empowering us to be much more diverse on our thinking skill set, allowing us to explore and grow the creative, computational, sensory and analytical sides of our mind.

Assuming this is the case, we need to “feed” people’s brains across these dimensions with marketing engagements, not just catering to one thinking style.  I’ll wait for the Harvard and MIT folks to prove me wrong in a way that’s more rooted in research, but in the mean time I’ll take David’s view of the mind as my jumping off point for how we have to approach our business and relate to consumers on a deeper level.

For more on David’s “New Creative Mind”, download the above in pdf, hand it to your colleagues and see where the conversation goes. You can here him talk about it at his podcast.