Marketers don’t think in a well-reasoned or rational way

I guess it’s no news that consumers don’t think in a well-reasoned or rational way. Clear examples of this are the paradox of choice and the work of Dan Ariely. So I won’t dig deeper in that marketing fallacy (for now).

The argument I do want to make might come more as a surprise. In my honest opinion it is the greatest marketing fallacy around today. It’s the fallacy that marketers think in a well-reasoned or rational way. And by marketers I mean you.


I would love to extend this argument with “there is not enough science in the marketing discipline” and “the intuition of marketers is worth nothing, so why not just dismantle the whole discipline?”. But first things first.

Marketers are just like humans
Important eyeopener for marketers this decade was the fact that consumers are not the rational agents we expected them to be. We went from Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens (PDF). But what applies to consumers also applies to marketers. Marketeers are very normal members of the Homo Sapiens family, despite the fact that marketers themselves forget this now and then. Even marketing experts are not a special kind of species. All human, all irrational. Actually very logical when you think about it.

Bounded Rationality
Marketers don’t act rationally because it’s impossible to do so. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon sees economic decision making as a vain attempt to be rational. If a complete analysis is to be done, a decision will be immensely complex. So when you are making your business case you think you are being very rational. But we both know that your excel sheet doesn’t contain a complete analysis. When you are modelling the market you hopefully realize that your equation is very limited. That’s because our thinking is limited, limited by our rationality.

Intuition doesn’t get smart by itself
Let me just be clear; I am definitely not somebody that dismisses rationality and says that intuition will save the day. It is a pity that some half-witted marketers pick up one book (1!) and think their gut feeling is something special. It is wrong to assume that what you can’t process rationally, you can process intuitively. The critique on Blink was that Malcolm Gladwell didn’t do a particular good job in explaining how intuition gets smart. Because in fact there is something special about the intuition of marketers when you compare them with experts in other fields.

World class chess players can process a stunning number of moves upfront. And very experienced firemen, while under immense pressure, can make snap judgments that come close to ideal decisions. But this requires years of practice. Intuition learns from experience when there is clear feedback. The marketer knows his market. He recognizes signals from this market. So the marketer’s intuition learns from this feedback, right?

What happens when I push this button?
Wrong. You can’t compare playing chess and firefighting with doing marketing. The market is a black box, far too complex to be understood. Let alone to be influenced or even controlled. It not some piece of machinery based on 4 P’s for example. No buttons that can be pushed. The signals that the marketers recognize, have nothing to do with their actions. Push button “Price” down and up goes “Sales”. Sorry, no cause-effect relation there. No learning curve. No nothing.

Conclusion
It wouldn’t be a big deal when I would say that marketers are irrational bastards, like the rest of us. Even the decisions that “Czech chess master”-type marketers make are fucked up.

Or am I being irrational when I say that?