soulsight®

Getting ready for my college reunion got me looking at old notebooks. I came across this page...

It brought up the day a physics professor once explained to me, a student of the arts at the time, a certain phenomenon that modern day physicists believe to exist. It goes something like this:

If we take space, all space, to be a sheet of rubber, and we then keep an object of mass (M) on it, the sheet of space curves with the weight of the object with mass (M). As a result, the rubber sheet space will go from being an undisturbed sheet to a curved sheet with mass (M) on it, as this very quick sketch that I drew at the time illustrates.

(Please ignore the purple paper, it was all I had handy that day)

"What are the weird red lines with arrows?" you might ask. I'm about to tell you. They're essentially other weightless objects moving around in space. They're just trying to move in a straight line, but when the object with mass (M) is introduced, due to the curvature in the sheet of space, the objects start moving in a way that will seem to the object with mass (M) as if the other objects are circling him/her/it.

So yeah, I think that explains the phenomenon. But I haven't written this (with the painstakingly created illustration) just to explain some weird physics. I had a Eureka moment when I revisited this sketch with new eyes. Because, now, as a student of consumer insights, I tried to apply this to life, and it made some sense.

I call this the “Egocentric Carousel” theory.

If we take our lives (space) as a sheet of rubber and us as object M, then in the same way mentioned above, to us (object M), all the other objects moving around, which are innocently just trying to move in a straight line, end up looking to us like they are revolving around us...as if we are sitting at the center of a carousel.

I'm, of course, not going to get the Nobel Prize for this, but what the heck, it sure does make sense to me.

So, if I can apply science to my straight up Voodoo theory, consumers believe they are the center of the universe and that all products that relate to them (i.e. the ones they pay attention to) orbit around them and become a part of their world.

The brands that have cracked this code of communicating with a visual language that resonates with the consumer (to the point where they really pay attention) have become iconic mainstays in our lives because we have dragged them into our gravitational pull.

What iconic brands have realized, is that it is all about the consumer. What they love, need, and aspire to be. It's not about brand personality by itself. It's about how the brand's personality engages the consumer's need state and what will attract them to notice.

That's how the seemingly, random roaming packs become part of our welcomed gilded menagerie.