{"id":2381,"date":"2016-08-17T18:11:23","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T23:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2381"},"modified":"2016-08-18T16:33:31","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T21:33:31","slug":"marketing-unplugged-an-honest-advertisement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/marketing-unplugged-an-honest-advertisement\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing Unplugged: An Honest Advertisement"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThe Genius of Birds<\/em>\u00a0is a book that provides a compelling tour of bird intelligence based on their navigational skills, architectural skills and vocal virtuosity.\u00a0 But it was the chapter on avian aesthetics that most piqued my interest.\u00a0 Specifically, I was startled by the description of the peacock\u2019s tail as an \u201chonest advertisement,\u201d a term that, from my experience, struck me as suspiciously oxymoronic.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am jaded from the hours spent wandering the grocery aisles reading labels.\u00a0 My view is that advertisimg operates in the murky gap between perception and reality \u2013 a jug of orange juice that advertises fresh taste<\/em>, while the orange juice itself is far from fresh; free range chickens, which only guarantees that chickens have access to a door if they can find it; the vague but comforting terms of natural, organic or artisan.\u00a0 In my experience, honesty is a rare attribute of advertising.<\/p>\n

The book implies that \u201chonest advertisement\u201d has become a scientific term with the peacock\u2019s tail its poster child.\u00a0 What forces of evolution produced something so gaudy?\u00a0 What exactly is the peacock advertising and why is it considered \u201chonest?\u201d \u00a0Charles Darwin agonized over the peacock.\u00a0 The va-va-va voom display of ornamental plumage did not fit into his bedrock concept of the \u201csurvival of the fittest.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The enormous train of the peacock would seem to be a clear evolutionary disadvantage \u2013 the peacock is both slow moving and easily spotted by predators.\u00a0\u00a0And yet the drab female peahen is clearly besotted with the most resplendent peacock, preferentially mating with those with the most abundant eyespots in their trains.\u00a0 In a letter to Asa Gray, a botanist colleague, Darwin wrote, \u201cThe sight of a peacock\u2019s tail, whenever I gaze at it, it makes me sick!\u201d<\/p>\n

Darwin eventually proposed that the drab peahens actually had a \u201ctaste for the beautiful,\u201d that the peacocks sought to \u201ccharm\u201d their mates, and that this impractical aesthetic sense must have had a separate evolutionary pathway, which he termed sexual selection.\u00a0 Alfred Lord Wallace, a cofounder of the theory of natural selection, dismissed the idea of beauty for beauty\u2019s sake and wrote \u201cThe only way in which we can account for the observed facts is by supposing that colour and ornament are strictly correlated with health, vigor and general fitness to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace believed that squandering precious resources on elaborate plumage was an indirect but\u00a0honest<\/em> advertisement of underlying fitness.\u00a0 Peacocks that lack the energy to produce a dazzling train must be feeble, diseased, or otherwise poorly qualified to mate.\u00a0 Basically, conspicuous consumption was considered an honest advertisement of underlying fitness.\u00a0 Wallace\u2019s theory was accepted and Darwin\u2019s theory that birds appreciated beauty was largely forgotten.<\/p>\n

The peacock\u2019s only function is to provide sperm.\u00a0 The responsibility for foraging, nest building or brooding the chicks is foisted upon the put-upon peahen.\u00a0 Therefore, the elaborate plumage is only advertising past<\/em> behavior, a visual statement that this peacock has overcome his tremendous handicap.\u00a0 On this basis alone he is a suitable mate.\u00a0 Co-parenting is the norm for most birds, and in this situation the female must make more subjective judgments about future<\/em> behavior, i.e. the male as a committed nest-mate.\u00a0 It seems to me that it is easier to be honest when all you are advertising is survival; there is little gap between perception and reality.\u00a0 In contrast, honesty about future behavior is\u00a0easily manipulated.\u00a0 My husband Nick loves to describe the bait and switch strategy he claims I used in the early days of our relationship.\u00a0 He believes I sent an honest signal that I liked to fish and assumed that we would happily forage together.\u00a0 However, once we got married he claims I stopped fishing completely.\u00a0 My version of the story is that my \u201cdishonest\u201d advertisement was nothing more than a large gap between perception and reality.<\/p>\n

Does the concept of an honest advertisement have any applicability to the human experience?\u00a0 \u00a0Maybe our aesthetic sense, our attraction to bright and shiny objects, can be traced back to honest advertisements of fitness, but in humans natural selection – the nitty gritty of survival – has been superseded by centuries of cultural evolution.\u00a0 Using the peacock model, anyone with adequate resources to indulge in conspicuous consumption \u2013 a high end sports car for example \u2013 would be considered a good catch.\u00a0 Oh, I dearly hope that mate selection has evolved beyond the eye candy of the 1%.\u00a0 Besides this strategy would require that the signaler (i.e. car owner) and receiver (typically the woman) share the same aesthetic.\u00a0 As we drive along the highway Nick is always amazed that I have absolutely no aptitude to distinguish between the fully-loaded Lexus and the down-market Camry.\u00a0 They all look the same to me. I would absolutely fail as a peahen, but the good news is that my mate selection has been spot on.<\/p>\n

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The Genius of Birds\u00a0is a book that provides a compelling tour of bird intelligence based on their navigational skills, architectural skills and vocal virtuosity.\u00a0 But it was the chapter on avian aesthetics that most piqued my interest.\u00a0 Specifically, I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[39,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing-unplugged","category-nature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-Cp","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2381"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2398,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions\/2398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}