The Most Important Concept in Marketing began when? and I don’t know about it!
Although the precise year for the promulgation of an idea that could have a vast effect on marketing could be argued, I’d put it at 1956. It was the year Edward Sapir, the linguist, published and promulgated much of the writings he and his colleague Benjamin Lee Whorf had accumulated over a fifteen-year period in a book entitled Language Although the two men never specifically provided a term for their assertion about the relationship between language and perception, it generally became known as the “Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis.” Years later, another linguist, Eric Lennenberg attempted to codify the ideas that the earlier researchers had gathered, and he provided a “soft” (statement number one) and “hard” (statement number two) expression of their views.
What does this have to do with “marketing” if the ideas have merit? Everything. What is the import of these ideas on the way you see the world in general? Everything.
Does it matter? You decide. Below is a link to the Wikipedia Article. I’ll add some thoughts tomorrow to avoid transgressing the BEMNOWP (Blog Entry Maximum Number of Words Length Protocol.)
- The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis or The Linguistic Relativity Principle
1. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language.
2. The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language*
*Brown, R. (1976). “In Memorial Tribute to Eric Lenneberg”. Cognition 4: 125–153.
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