Malcom Gladwell wrote a review for the New Yorker last week on Charles Tilly’s new book “Why” and although i didn’t get into the review as much, here is some great insight by malcom on our world that i gleaned from his blog post. I blocked it out below, but what i loved is the idea that different communication styles connect with different contexts and one of the jobs of the marketer is to determine which story for which context in order for that group to understand, experience and follow.

For those who haven’t read it, Tilly provides a taxonomy of reason-giving. We emply four kinds of explanations, he says: conventions (social formulae), stories (common sense narratives), codes (legal formulae) and technical accounts (specialized stories). And we get into trouble when we use one kind of reason in a context where another is necessary. What’s fun about Tilly’s argument is that it provides a way of understanding all kinds of problematic social interactions. In the piece, I talk about the difficulty children have in understanding the admonition “don’t be a tattle-tale” and the Dick Cheney shooting accident and restorative justice–among other things. Here is a comment from a reader, Jason Oke, who is the senior planner at Leo Burnett in Toronto. It’s an elegant extension of the arguments I made against focus groups in “Blink,” this time using Tilly’s taxonomy:

I think, as I gather you do, that how we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story – we may both buy Tide, but there’s a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up.

But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: “It’s a good value”, “my family likes it”, “it tastes good.” And it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.