Last week, marketing guru Seth Godin quoted the 17th-century Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián y Morales:

Know how to sell your wares, Intrinsic quality isn’t enough. Not everyone bites at substance or looks for inner value. People like to follow the crowd; they go someplace because they see other people do so. It takes much skill to explain something’s value. You can use praise, for praise arouses desire. At other times you can give things a good name (but be sure to flee from affectation). Another trick is to offer something only to those in the know, for everyone believes himself an expert, and the person who isn’t will want to be one. Never praise things for being easy mon: you’ll make them seem vulgar and facile. Everybody goes for something unique. Uniqueness appeals both to the taste and to the intellect.

Marketing e a long way since this advice. In today’s NYT, Kenneth Chang examines how “more and more retailers are also using more rigorous scientific techniques to improve their bottom line.”

In “Enlisting Science’s Lessons to Entice More Shoppers to Spend More,” Chang writes that “OfficeMax is one example,” of pany engaged in this in-depth marketing research. “It has hired Envirosell, a market pany based in New York that takes an anthropological approach to understanding how shoppers navigate stores. panies turn to statistical methods used in testing nuclear weapons. New scientific technologies like brain scans also panies to peer directly into consumers’ minds.”

That last line is no doubt a bit of hyperbole, but the physicalist/materialist assumptions of many scientists and marketers e rather obvious as you read through the story. Marketing, it seems, has “evolved” in more ways than one since the days of Baltasar Gracián y Morales.