Into your Vedic literature? You may have come across Blind Men and an Elephant, a parable that remains as pertinent today as it did 3,000 years ago.
If you’re not familiar with it then here’s the gist.
A group of blind men hear of a bizarre new animal in town: the ‘elephant’. Curious, they seek it out and use their touch to build a visualisation. The problem is, they each touch a different part of the creature.
One likens the elephant to a snake; unaware he’s holding its trunk. Another, feeling one of its legs, describes the animal as similar to a pillar, or tree trunk. The third man, touching its side, compares it to a wall, while the fourth, gripping a tusk, asserts that it’s much like a spear.
Each of the men believe their experience to be the objective truth, resulting in bitter feuds and, depending on the version you read, either fights to the death or, with the help of a guiding light, a gradual acceptance that each man is kind of right.
What does this mean?
The truth, as the parable suggests, is slippery. It can be both subjective and objective.
But objectivity isn’t always easy to pinpoint. Humans believed that the Earth was truly flat for millennia, before the Ancient Greeks came along and showed us otherwise. The Victorians treated heroin as an over-the-counter remedy for coughs, until science and medicine rebranded it as a highly addictive, destructive substance.
Of course, proving an objective truth doesn’t guarantee acceptance. People are good at believing what they want to believe; context, as always, is everything.
And here’s where subjective truth comes in. Our individual experiences provide the building blocks for worldviews that, when allied with the right narratives, can spread like wildfire.
Brexit, for example, was borne from decades of anti-European political sentiment that over time, filtered into the national psyche. Bring in the fact that austerity measures had left many communities and public services under-funded – not to mention the reduction in wages driven by overseas labour – and it shouldn’t be so hard to see why a majority felt that the promised benefits of tighter border controls and parliamentary sovereignty were worth it.
The truth is we all experience the world differently. Yes, there are powers at play that seek to manipulate ‘facts’ to influence our direction of travel, but how we interpret these influences depends on personal pressure points that, in turn, guide us to signposts such as fear, frustration, hope and apathy.
Implications for the industry
Various social commentators assert that we now live in a post-truth age; opinion has become fact. But if this is a new phenomenon, why do 3,000-year-old parables warn us against this very thing? If life post-2016 has shown us anything, it’s that social media and the battle for clicks are symptoms of humanity’s intrinsic impulse to mould the truth around our own experiences and beliefs.
Sometimes, marketing risks straying into this territory. It’s easy to think that because of our extensive training and knowledge, we have all the answers when it comes to developing messages that will resonate with a target audience.
But if this parable teaches us one lesson, it’s that we need to put ourselves in the shoes of others, and respect differing views on the same object of observation. We need to listen intently, ensure our workforces are representative of the diverse society we live in, and understand that a 27-year-old marketing professional in London may not see the world in the same way as someone of the same age on the other side of the country.
Yes, there may be universalisms we share, but orbiting these objective truths – and changing the way they’re framed – are factors such as geography, race, socioeconomic status and community.
If we focus too much on what we ourselves sense and feel, then we’re effectively only talking to ourselves. We’re selling a tree trunk when others see a snake. We need to understand that within the audience personas we create and demographics we buy exists a smorgasbord of attitudes, worldviews and motivations.
Final thoughts
It’s practically impossible to please everyone – and the febrile environment we currently live in makes trying to do so even harder.
But at a time when businesses are faced with a plethora of challenges – from climate change and a global pandemic, to Brexit and the rising costs of living – it’s vital that we’re able to empathise with every viewpoint without erring from our core principles and values.
Marketers are experts in creating demand, cajoling interest and spotlighting issues with a status quo; fundamentally, we craft stories centred around solutions to perceived problems.
That’s some power we wield. So, let’s confront the elephant in the room, and not go in blind when it comes to our handling of people’s individual truths.
