We live in a era in which concern for quarterly business results dominates business decision making.

In marketing departments, this bottom-line mentality manifests itself in a reliance on process and a deep suspicion of originality. The proof is on the shelves in stores everywhere, where me-too products and line extensions abound, while novel product concepts and brands struggle to be seen.

And it’s not just the products that have ‘caution’ and ‘conventional’ written all over them, but the advertising, too, much of which is denuded of anything that smacks of the unconventional or the unexpected.

What’s missing from both is the ability to engage people, to inspire them, to transport them into a state of wonder or astonishment. In a paper delivered recently during a lecture series at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, Mark Kingswell, a political and cultural theorist, author, critic and assistant philosophy professor at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College, observes that upon being transported by an object into a state of wonder, ‘people see the world of the everyday as suddenly strange and mysterious.’

‘Wonder,’ he goes on to say, ‘is three-fold. It invites investigation of the world, but also reflection on the subject who experiences that world, and on his or her experience itself.’

Could there be a better description, from the point of view of a marketing executive, of the ideal receptive state of a consumer when he or she is experiencing a new product or seeing an ad for the first time? Hardly.

Unfortunately, marketers at this point in their industry’s history seem, for the most part, to be too limited by emphasis on structure and fear of failure to expose themselves to the risk inherent in trying to create a product or ad that would inspire wonder.

The few exceptions that exist – the new Volkswagen Beetle comes immediately to mind – serve merely to prove the rule.

In the Feb. 16 issue of Strategy, columnist John Burghardt wrote that it is the ‘job of creative people to stretch their minds as far outside the boardroom as they can because that’s how they’ll be able to reach out and touch someone, that’s where the sale will eventually be made.’

Burghardt was speaking about ad agency creatives, but clearly the same applies to marketing executives.

Perhaps the last word should go to columnist Graham Watt, who, in this issue of Strategy, touches on the same theme.

‘The ad business desperately needs oddballs who don’t have great cvs but have the potential to break out into fresh thinking. People who think outside the box.’

‘Oddballs,’ he continues, ‘have given us whole new industries and pastimes; snowboarding, freestyle skiing, ultralight aircraft, in-line skates, sailboards. These things pop out of individual minds as ideas, not as a result of structure, teamwork, process and research.’