 On May 15, 2013 when Nasa announced that the days of Kepler are numbered, the whole scientific community mourned. Geoff Marcy, [and his team] who discovered over 250 extrasolar planets was of course saddened by the news and he turned to poetry for solace. When asked why poetry? His answer simply was: "I did not think. I just felt." "Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week, no weekend rest, My noon, my midnight, my talks, my song; I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong." When a hardcore scientist combats his sadness with poetry, it makes you wonder of the magic that lies in the echoes of poetry. Often, we are enthralled by its mystery. Why? you may ask. The short answer is "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." It is the language in which you explore your own wonderment. It gives you "the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it." It is a powerful vessel that engages your emotion, inspires your will and makes you do.  “Emotion recollected in tranquillity,” gives birth to poetry. Emotion – once a largely ignored field of cognitive psychology – has become accepted as a major spring of consumer behaviour. So much so, that many advertisers now view the creation of emotional engagement as their primary objective. – David Penn, md, Conquest Research Major leaps in neuroscience has overturned the traditional view of consumer being driven by rationality to the one being dictated by emotions and subconscious. The science of the our firing neurons teaches us these key lessons:
 Know the uniqueness within you, unveil the creativity within you, and your poetic grace
 Hence, the rush for brand marketers to capture the emotional sentiments of the consumers. If emotion is the driver in decision making then, our responsibility is to find ways to perpetuate it. And there lies the limitation in traditional approaches. Because, "When you ask someone about an emotion, you change the emotion." And requesting consumers to quantify or rank emotional responses, such as on a scale of 1 to 10, is even more difficult for them. Source: Marketing and Neuroscience What Drives Customer Decisions Here is where memory metric plugs in. In order for memory to work, you need to be recalling memory and creating memory all at the same time. So, you bombard those neurons with creative repetition and arouse the synaptic nerves with poetry. Yes, Poetry. Let's just try this. Shall we? Read the poem below and as you are reading be mindful of the visuals that your neurons are formulating to help you digest this information. How do you feel? What do you see?  Every word in this poem strikes me with its' aching beauty. The truth is tender, yet glaring. I am haunted by the words “unanimous blood" – that we are all, even in our difference, part of this complex interconnection. It reminds me of the basics: the oxygen that sustains us and our memories that write the poetry of our tiny lives. [The Salvadorian revolutionary poet was twice sentenced to death and jailed by the State for his beliefs and both times he evaded fate. The escape would become an essential part of his myth: the revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods. However, at forty he was eventually murdered. Perhaps he wrote with this eventuality in mind. With eyes wide open, a joke dying on his lips; in this poem and in others, "he expressed the vividness and universality of that which sustains us: poetry and bread."]  What is so special about poetry? Using fMRI imaging, Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist from the University of Exeter Medical School, led an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology and English. They found that emotionally charged writing, like poetry [not prose] aroused several regions in the brain, predominantly on the right side; very similar regions that had previously been shown to produce the “shivers down the spine” emotional reaction to music. Also poetry, not prose, was found to activate areas of the brain associated with introspection and recollection. These preliminary findings does point to the fact that it is poetry that lights up more regions of your brain, thus paving way for more synaptic connections. And we all know, “neurons that wire together, fire together.”  “Biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” --Dr. Jill Taylor Bolte If you feel nothing. You do nothing. And, poetry makes you feel. It makes you "laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it however tragic it may be all that matters is the eternal movement behind it – the great undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation and ignorance – however un-lofty the intention of the poem…" Today, you are inundated with insurmountable mount of data—demographic data, purchasing data, search data, social data, and web data. With this data you are able to understand the need, desires and the mindset of your customers based on their behaviour and their journeys. With your creativity you make the engagement interesting and desirable, not just functional and utilitarian. And, poetry strengthens you in your creative journey that prevents your brand from fading into mere commodities in both engagement and product experience.  “Creativity is a means of controlling chaos, finding order. Business and poetry draw their waters out of the same well.” —John Barr, President, Poetry Foundation In her book, What Poetry Brings to Business, Clare Morgan and her colleagues demonstrate how the steaming creative energy, emotional power, and "communicative complexity of poetry" contributes directly to human innovation and problem solving. “Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,.. the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’. This is the same strange land, in which twenty-first-century business executives and [marketers] routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. " For the first time in the written history of mankind, we are flourishing in a society (i.e the matured economies) of having more than enough. This "more than enough" is being spent on products and services that have more than mere utilitarian function. As we transition from an Information Society towards a Dream Society, we expect more from the brands and the companies that we do business with. We now value one "human ability that can't be automated: emotion." We want to be inspired. We want products and services that have a design, a story and a heart. Don't just persuade and promote. Empower me — Make me dream, make me laugh, make me cry, make me high! Articles you might like:
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Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Franz Kafka |
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