Has Our Focus On Tech Led To No Sociology Syndrome?

By Kevin Gray

This morning, I took a quick peek at a few LinkedIn discussion groups and spotted plenty of interesting stuff…

RDBMS, Hadoop, Python, Scala…

IoT, AI, Support Vector Machines, RFID…

Wearables, Biometrics, Virtual Reality, Telemetrics…

Bayes, Bayes, Bayes, Bayes…

But no sociology. Nothing about people.

To be sure, there’s more to the social and behavioral sciences than sociology and what I’m describing is not truly a syndrome. Let’s not forget philosophy, history, art or literature, either.  And, admittedly, when I was growing up, the social and behavioral sciences – psychology in particular – were hyped nearly as much as Big Data is today.  It turns out they did not have all the answers – only a few, perhaps – but they did pose questions that we, as marketers, should at least be thinking about.

Advances in technology should not be decried, though. They have worked what past generations could only have regarded as magic. But I do wonder if the spotlight on tech these days is one reason why we sometimes get special offers for things we already purchase frequently and ads for things we’ll never, ever buy. Has marketing become too narrow-minded?

Though I’m a quant guy myself I do have a fairly strong background in non-mathematical subjects as well.  But in my attempts to keep my head above the technical waters, I must admit my own attention has become heavily skewed in the past several years (e.g., http://cannongray.com/methods).

These days, is there so much technical stuff being crammed into our eyes and ears that we marketers are finding it harder to see the big picture?  Are we forgetting what consumers are really like and how they really live?  After all, mathematics can only provide a rough approximation of human reality.

Maybe I’m just imagining things.  I hope so.