Digital Delights

Imagination is needed in marketing to create new value sets to consumers that separate new products from others. This requires originality to create innovation. Imagination is the essence of marketing opportunity that conjures up images and entices fantasy to consumers, allowing them to feel what it would be like to live at Sanctuary Cove in Northern Queensland, Australia, receiving a Citibank loan, driving a Mercedes 500 SLK around town, or holidaying in Bali. Imagination aids our practical reasoning and opens up new avenues of thinking, reflection, organizing the world, or doing things differently. Imagination decomposes what already is, replacing it with what could be, and is the source of hope fear, enlightenment, and aspirations.

Imagination is not a totally conscious process. New knowledge may incubate subconsciously when a person has surplus attention to focus on recombining memory and external stimuli into new meanings. Most people tend to spend a great deal of time while they are awake “daydreaming”, where attention shifts away from the present mental tasks to an unfolding sequence of private responses. This may be enough to activate our default network, a web of autobiographical mental imagery, which may provide new connections and perspectives about a problem we have been concerned with. Recent research has shown that the brain periodically shifts phase locking during a person’s consciousness, where neural networks activate and these brief periods may be enough to allow the dominant left hemisphere give way to the right hemisphere, enabling  a person to see the environment, problem or issue from a new perspective.