Marketing Madness

Don't be so uptight

Today we celebrate the contributions of insanity to modern marketing. I suggest that this link explains marketing’s otherwise inexplicable attraction as a vocation and its utility as a capitalist tool.

As proof of the vocation’s unnatural attraction, I submit the intern phenomenon. I know of few other occupations that convince so many intelligent, educated and motivated people to work for free. And those of us who have managed to land a paying gig in marketing sure didn’t do it for the money.

Surely this is madness, but perhaps it is madness of the most rational kind. We naturally seek to be around people like us, and marketing, which rewards creativity, attracts the slightly mad. (Note to all of our wonderful interns past, present and future: I am not calling you crazy. You are invariably intelligent, educated and motivated. But you have chosen a crazy profession.)

The link between madness and creativity is ancient. Here is my favorite philosopher, Plato, on the subject:

“But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness…”  (from Phaedrus)

“…he is not capable of poetry until he is inspired by the gods and out of his mind and there is no reason in him…” (from Ion)

Kay Redfield Jamison: Crazy Expert

As Plato notes, poets tend to be crazy as a rule, a finding that has been confirmed by many modern studies. Kay Redfield Jamison, a bona fide manic-depressive, with at least one suicide attempt to her credit, and perhaps the foremost authority on the link between creativity and madness, has found that, on average, half of all poets are cracker dog crazy. Here’s her breakdown of the prevalence of mental illness among creative types:

Poets – 50% crazy

Musicians – 38% crazy

Painters – 20% crazy

Sculptors – 18% crazy

Architects  – 17% crazy

Jamison’s book, Touched With Fire, is a fascinating exploration of the crazy/creativity connection, and includes a nearly exhaustive list of writers, musicians and artists whom she believes were mentally ill. The list of writers includes William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, William James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Mary Shelly, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leo Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrel, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Percy Blyhe Shelly, Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman and many, many more.

William Faulkner: happy go lucky guy

Indeed, reading through Jamison’s list, I am hard pressed to think of any writer worth a damn who was not crazy. Only C.S. Lewis and Robert Frost come readily to mind – but they are not in the same league with giants like Faulkner, Twain, Tolstoy and Elliot.

(I find the James brothers inclusion in this list particularly weird, as Henry was, in my humble opinion, the most conventional and pedestrian writer of his generation, and William, as America’s greatest psychiatrist, virtually defined sanity, at least what it means to be a sane American. If William James was mentally ill, he is proof that being outside the bounds of normalcy can allow one to more clearly see where the boundaries lie.)

So, if you will, let’s take it as a given that 1) creative people tend to have at least one or two loose screws, 2) that they tend to cluster together and that 3) these clusters tend to be most prevalent in jobs that reward creativity, i.e., marketing.

Okay… but marketing is the art of convincing people, most of whom are not crazy, to do something that they otherwise might not do. How can crazy people persuade well-adjusted folks to do anything? How can they even communicate with them?

I suggest the answer is two-fold: 1) Crazy is not the same as stupid and 2) Normalcy is boring.

“Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence,” according to an obscure Finnish author Henrik Tikkanen. Though Mr. Tikkanen is not well known, his theory is. For instance, a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that “Individuals with excellent school performance had a nearly fourfold increased risk of later bipolar disorder compared with those with average grades.”

And if you think about it, it makes sense. If your brain circuitry is pretty simple, there’s not much that can go wrong. But, if it is more complex, it’s more likely that something will go awry – and once it does, that extra horsepower is only going to compound the damage.

But, if many of our greatest writers were mentally ill, it’s obvious that mental illness does not have to be completely debilitating. In fact, it seems it can be quite enervating. Combining intelligence with a skewed view of reality is likely to produce some pretty interesting results – ala, captivating TV spots, insightful headlines, imaginative events, intriguing press releases and breakthrough design.

Not the product of a normal mind

The fact is that it is exactly the inability of creative people to think like the rest of the world that enables them to be so good at capturing the world’s attention.  Being normal and well-adjusted is pleasant precisely because there are no surprises. But that can get pretty boring after a while, and when a funny or strange or beautiful or sad or otherwise abnormal stimulus reaches the normal bubbles we live in, well, it’s exciting. We perk up and pay attention. And if the marketer who sent the message was skillful, we purchase.

And that is madness’s invaluable contribution to capitalism