Who is Tom Beakbane?

I’m the author of Consilience and the Business of Persuasion.

I run a brand communications agency called, you guessed it: Beakbane. Beakbane: Smart Brand Communications, to be exact. I’ve been doing this for close to 20 years. Prior to that I worked in marketing management for multinationals, including United Biscuits PLC in London and Pepsi-Cola in Toronto.

You might be asking what qualifies me, Tom Beakbane, to write about consilience. The book tackles some challenging concepts such as emergence, embodiment, consciousness, relevance and metaphor, to name a few. While I am not an expert in any of them, I have always enjoyed understanding the technicalities of subjects and figuring out their significance.

My job forces me not only to understand the detail of projects that in some cases are highly technical, such as how a drug or medical device works, but also I have to step back and see how initiatives relate to the cultural context. Also, each day I am involved in the process of helping communicate complex messages so that they hit a nerve and are believed.

Every day I deal with experts in a diverse array of fields – such as medicine, engineering, statistics, writing, composing, and acting – and have to reconcile the different viewpoints. As the president of an agency, I am constantly faced with the task of understanding the sometimes-conflicting perspectives of those with specialized knowledge. My job is to try to weave their expertise together to create compelling and believable brand communications.

For a marketing executive, my perspective is somewhat unusual because I have a degree in neurophysiology and love science. Since I was 8 years old I have devoured scientific journals and science books. And yet, unlike experts in specialized fields, I can remain dissociated from the minutiae of prevailing controversies and observe how they fit into the broader picture. And as I am not a member of academia I am not distracted by the burdens of teaching, nor do I have to be worry about how my ideas might be viewed by my academic colleagues.

But at the same time I am sensitive to the difficulties of communicating new ideas as I run training sessions for CEOs on effective marketing decision-making and have spoken at industry conferences around the world. And as I experience the pressures of running a business, I know that for new ideas to have any mileage they need to be useful.

Prior to becoming a professional marketer, I was a sous-chef on the Côte d’Azur on the French Riviera. I have a B.Sc. (Honours) in neurophysiology and biochemistry from the University of Durham (England), where I was awarded honorary lifetime membership on student council for bringing the student co-op to profitability for the first time in its history.

I now reside north of Toronto with my wife and two daughters.

What sparked an interest in consilience?

Like many scientists and philosophers, I am fascinated by questions such as: How can we be sure about what we know? How do we think? Why do people sometimes appear to act irrationally? These questions relate to my job: creating brands and helping companies sell them. If a client disagrees with a program my company has developed, it is helpful to know why and how we can arrive at a better solution.

I am particularly interested in the discoveries of frontline researchers in mathematics, genetics and human biology. I attempt to apply the ideas to my job, combining the scientific ideas with the art of communication. Although I am deeply interested in science and love art, I have been continually flummoxed by the discontinuities and incompatibilities between them. I have tried to understand why science, even though it is advancing at such a phenomenal pace, is so often unhelpful when it comes to giving us the answers we are looking for.

Surely, if we understand what happens in the human brain, it should help us answer questions about human behavior. To some extent, it does. At the same time, however, the more you read about the details of the human brain, the more confusing everything becomes. Why is this? Because the nitty-gritty details of what scientists have been finding diverge from common sense ideas about how we think we think. Popular scientific accounts of how the brain works, such as those presented in the bestseller How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, add to the confusion, as they do not resolve basic questions such as: What is thinking? And how does it relate to behavior?

The confusion started to lift for me when I began to read books about the historical context in which various scientists have made their discoveries. I felt a twinge of familiarity because, in advancing new theories, scientists face the same challenges my marketing colleagues and I face when we conceive new products and attempt to sell them. We explain products by coining new words and employing metaphor to help people comprehend the product’s benefits. The names we coin encapsulate metaphors that, if all goes well, become “brands” and part of our everyday language.

I realized that my interest in science was not as divorced from my job as I had previously assumed. Marketers coin words, or use old words creatively to communicate new ideas, and scientists do the same. The words that scientists coin encapsulate the concepts they have discovered. The words open up new vistas of descriptive possibilities, so writers, teachers and leading opinion-makers adopt them and eventually they pass into common usage. The scientific discoveries are used as metaphors. The result is we have expressions such as: people who are “magnetic;” moods that are “electric;” leaders who exert “power;” companies that have “inertia” and brands that have “DNA.”

In each case the metaphors communicate concepts that are not directly related to the original scientific observations. However, shorthand versions of what the science represents come to be used everyday and as a consequence scientific ideas exert an influence on how people think in widely separated fields – including business.

Business managers might be surprised to know how ideas that have their origins in science affect their thinking. One of the most powerful influences on contemporary thinking is the theory of evolution. It is the foundation for the Western World’s widespread faith in the inevitability of the positive outcome of progress and also the foundation for the belief that healthy businesses exist as a result of competition. Animals in the wild have to compete for resources and struggle to survive, likewise companies have to survive and prosper by getting the better of their competitors. As a result “competitive strategy” is regarded as a key modus operandi in business and in academia its study carries more weight than, say, the study of cooperation.

However, it is dangerous to take the scientific metaphors too literally. Evolution is a concept that encompasses some extraordinarily complex and diverse biological processes. When these complexities are understood it becomes evident that evolution should not be used to justify business techniques.

Because I enjoy learning about the details of science I became sensitized to the mismatch between scientific ideas and how they are commonly used to explain and validate business approaches. I started to notice how many of the words we use in marketing are based on metaphors that originate in science and technology. For instance, “marketing,” “targeting” and “awareness” have been adopted from respectively: economics, warfare and psychology. These words are useful, but sometimes, when they are taken too literally they become counterproductive.

Is consilience of value in the practice of marketing?

Yes. The better we understand human nature the more likely we will make effective decisions, so naturally consilience has value in marketing. However, consilience is different to traditional perspectives that are “managerial.” Managerial perspectives have appealed to the technically-minded who, like scientists have often been motivated by a desire to invent ideas that increase their control over the world. Rather than enabling greater control, consilience instead gives us a more realistic assessment of our inability to force people to behave in ways that might suit us.

More generally it is helpful to understand the nature of understanding itself. Often it is not appreciated how the words we use influence how we think. For instance if a manager conceives that potential customers exist as “markets” it will affect their approach to building new business – often negatively.

Another aspect of a deeper understanding of words is to recognize how they become badges of identity for different subcultures. So for instance if you question the worth of “strategy,” you mark yourself as a business outsider. Similarly, if you question “science” and “evolution,” those who “believe” in these concepts will become suspicious and presume you are a religious extremist and a believer in creationism.

For marketers it is invaluable to comprehend the nature of subcultures and develop an understanding of the underlying principles that enable us to communicate and be believed – or switch people off. Once one starts to comprehend these matters, it helps resolve other issues such as why marketing textbooks are generally so unenlightening, particularly in the areas of art, belief, and interpersonal dynamics.

One of my goals in writing Consilience and the Business of Persuasion is to help those who wish to be elite practitioners in the field of marketing communications develop their skills. Ultimately this will make the techniques everyone uses more dependable. My desire, wishful dreaming perhaps, is to help elevate the field to a higher level of sophistication, and to a higher level of integrity.