And yet despite the difficulties of proof, most of us instinctively accept the existence of relationships between marketing behaviour and relative commercial performance. And these principles are the only guidelines we have in the vast scheme of relationships that is marketing. My personal search for fundamental principles to explain what I know to be true about marketing is rewarded in unexpected places. My latest discovery provides grounding for the oft-repeated command to differentiate at all costs. Information, in the technical sense, is surprise value, measured as the inverse of expected probabillity.
Redundancy is the opposite of information, a measure of unsurprisingness, of old-hatitude.
Everything that we know about the world comes to us via nerve cells whose impulses chatter like machine guns. This is what nerve cells do for signalling almost everything about the world. It doesn't throw away information, it only throws away redundancy. Dawkins proceeds interestingly to describe the 'virtual world' our brains construct for us from assumptions made about the gaps between the change messages they receive. As we wade our way through our over-stimulated lives, our coding systems would recognise a great deal of redundancy in advertising and other marketing material.