Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Memory Of The Future.


Memory of the future is the provocative phrase that I came across recently that refers to the brain's ability to use memory to picture and plan future events. I term it provocative because of its combination of memory a word that evokes looking back and future that evokes looking forward.

Being ignorant of its neuroscientific origin, I immediately conjured up the idea of memories of what we were told the future would bring - the ones that usually involved personalised-jetpacks and dehydrated food.

Inevitably memories of the future are usually unfulfilled, but the whole concept is so redolent of ambition, aspiration and lost opportunities that it seems to me to be a rich seam for marketing to mine. While it's uniquely individual inasmuch as it combines memory of what we expected the future to look like and what we hoped our own personal futures would become, it taps in perfectly to the whole idea of consumption being about creating that future.

I'm not sure yet where this lead, but if your product/service could promise that our memory of the future is, in fact, our future, that would be a compelling first step.

4 Comments:

Blogger Herdmeister said...

Actually, I wrote about it in Creative Age and (I think) Herd, too. ;-)

6:00 AM, August 18, 2010  
Blogger Charles Edward Frith said...

Hello mate. I just came across the name of Ray Kurzweil's new movie coming out and thought of you. It's called:

The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future

6:21 AM, August 18, 2010  
Blogger john dodds said...

@Herdmeister Must make an effort to read that book ;O)

@Charles I am touched.

4:09 AM, August 19, 2010  
Blogger Eaon Pritchard said...

One thing is for sure.
The future is not what it was.

5:08 PM, August 31, 2010  

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