Law Of Averages

If you talk with any marketing or promotion person, anyone in advertising or media, they will eventually use the word average. The world continues to shrink, and our ability to measure ourselves continues to evade us. Anyone who has a social networking profile has surrendered personal information into the ether. Where that information goes, who digests it, who keeps it, and who uses it, is anyone’s guess.

But we share with wild abandon while the survey and research industries continue to call us average. A man between the ages of 18 and 34 enjoys rock music, drinking beer, and watching sports. Meanwhile, a woman in her 50’s prefers television shows about pets and home improvement. There, the job is complete. There is no need to go any further.

If we are going to continue to use the law of averages, I wonder why we spend so much time gathering more information about each other only to toss it all in the blender and hit puree.

What may save us all a lot of time is to appoint one man and one woman from each age between birth and 100 and they will be our case study. Whatever our case study man of 31 years old does and likes will speak for all 31 year old men on the planet.

That saves us a lot of pontificating and guesswork.

I was watching a few minutes of the popular show Mad Men the other night and wondered how far we may have evolved since the days of smoking freely in the office while tapping a female assistant on the derriere after she gets the drinks, honey. These guys look like knuckle dragging Neanderthals, but forty years ago they were cited as cutting edge.

So we have created a more balanced world, right? Women make the same as men; egotistical well-fed blue suit wearing management types are open to new ideas; a man between the ages of 18 and 34 still enjoys watching Sunday football?

Glad we solved that.

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