A recent commercial for Ocean Spray diet cranberry drink was, according to the Wall St. Journal (6/4/07 Page B8), created with the aid of “lab-coat-wearing scientists as it seeks to get deeper into the heads of consumers.” You can see the ad (along with another commercial) at here

The article goes on to describe that the agency, which created to ad, employs an individual with a Ph.D. in cognitive science. The ad superficially looks like an ordinary consumer spot, however the “scientist” is credited with changing the ad’s content to be less confusing and facilitate better information processing by the ad’s audience.

Should you add a cognitive scientist or any other scientist to your marketing team or is this a case buzz word invasion in marketing. For the commercial in question, we cannot yet say.

Physicist Richard Feynman, in his perennially interesting Feynman Lectures On Physics, characterized science as the discipline in which disputes are decided by experiment. Yet for the Ocean Spray commercial, data on outcomes, such as sales, are noticeably absent. Until they are included, I’ll go light on the diet cranberry drink.