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Driving to work this week I listened to a radio interview with a guy called Dr Mark Miodownik. He’s giving this year’s Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution and, hailing from good geek stock as I do, these have been something of a fixture in my childhood Christmas’. (In his lecture this year – Why elephants can’t dance – He’ll be talking about scale, why it matters and how the size of objects governs the extent to which rules affect them. Wikileaks anyone?).

The fascinating subject aside (another blog post is fermenting as I write), something he said during the interview made me think. He was talking about how the role of a lecturer in a university is changing from providing information to providing inspiration, and went on to qualify this saying something along the lines of: Look at the medium you’re using (a person at the front of a room, talking), and the nature of the information you’re trying to get across, they’re inherently unsuited to each other. There is so much information available to impart that the real role of a lecturer in today’s exponential world is to provide the inspiration and orientation for students to go out and inform themselves from more appropriate mediums.

Apply that logic to the marketing world and you get a great analogy. In the past, products / brands / concepts have been sufficiently few in number, or at least in density that a broadcast model, the person at the front of the room, could provide enough information within the given time constraints to enable people to make informed decisions. Now that simply isn’t the case. I’m not saying broadcast models aren’t valuable, they are. Just think about the way you use them. What messages are best suited to being broadcast, and where do people need to be able to interrogate them for themselves…