Waves and particles as consumer insight

Consumer waves and particles.

Just read something over at ConversationAgent.com about brand loyalty and incentive programs. This caused me to think about how we derive our notions about brand loyalty. First read their article here - 

http://www.conversationagent.com/2011/05/parity-brand-and-customer-programs.html#comment-6a00d8341c03bb53ef014e88c90699970d

An analogy of the consumer brand loyalty phenomenon can be drawn from quantum physics. The data we use to confirm our view of brand loyalty is all information from a distance. Purchase history, repeat business, loyalty card use etc. 

From this we derive, what could be called, the Wave Form of aggregate brand loyalty behavior. This Wave Form is self sustaining because of the distance between the consumer and the marketer. This distance may safely ignore the effects of indirect forces. The method of data collection tend to throw out or diminish variance.

The problem with the Wave Form in marketing is similar to the problem in physics - as soon as we observe the subject directly, the Wave collapses into a particle. In our case the particle is the individual consumer. The individual user distroys the coherent wave and becomes undefined. The trouble is, with today's tools we are able, with more accuracy, to observe the individual user.

The information that defines each user will always be a smaller set than the Wave because it is a subset of the Wave. Any large marketing organization that functions with a mass market approach will react to this subset in the same way - it will be ignored. The argument for this seems quite logical, the greater effort and resource must be put toward the largest average proportion of users.

However, the greater portion of users, The Wave, are composed from the individual customers. The Wave is a fiction, the individual users are the facts. As much as the phrase "multi-channel" is used in modern marketing, its meaning almost never takes into account the multiple channels of users.