“There has to be a way to ensure the success of a marketing campaign,” I thought in the summer of 2015. While many effective marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns were created by people just winging it, I suspected there was a known set of footholds in the human psyche which marketers could target to increase their response rates. What were they?
The question led down on a path of intellectual inquiry that began on Penny Lane and wound half way across the globe to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1991 when the book Human Universals was published by Dr. Donald Brown. The book presents a big idea that flew in the face of the prevailing assumption in anthropology that humans were different.