We Marketers Are Too Rational

We marketers, as Rory Sutherland notes in Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Business and Life, often monumentally fail because we’re too rational.

Consumer behavior is a large part of marketing, and it has been utilized as a tool for understanding segments and their needs.

And yet, we look at consumer behavior mathematically.

“If we utilize priming effectively in this strategy, we should see awareness increase by X%.”

“The data indicates that our consumers enjoy this color, so we should discontinue our lines with?

other colors.”

“We can utilize our recent award for #1 X in America for social proof in our next campaign.”

The problem with consumer behavior is that it’s based on human behavior, and human behavior is far from rational and logical.

Take the second example above of cutting your product lines to the only color that sells.

It makes sense from an economical perspective, because logically, if people are overwhelmingly buying one color of your product, it would be cheaper and easier to focus marketing efforts on that singular product.

Yet what we don’t account for is the irrational factors of human nature, such as perhaps the reason people were buying their product in the first place was because competitors didn’t give them an option to choose their color.

This doesn’t make sense at all from the perspective of an economist, but in this case it turns out that people like the ability to choose what product they buy more than the product itself.

By removing the psychological factor that gave this company their competitive advantage, they suddenly lose their market share because they are no different than their competitors.

Just because we don’t know why something works, does not mean that we should be blind to the fact that it does.

In fact, I would argue that a lot of the best marketing and advertising works because it focuses on some form of nonsense.

Here is an example:

A study was performed on people who were given $50 wine, $100 wine, and $500 wine.

When asked to rate which wine tastes best, the participants accordingly rated the $500 wine the best, followed by the $100 and eventually the $50.

So far, it makes sense right? Here’s the kicker: It was all the same wine.

They also tried the study where instead of price tags, they used differently weighted bottles.

As you may have guessed, the wine poured from a heavier bottle tasted better than its lighter counterparts, even though the wine inside the bottles were identical.

So as marketers, we should get a little bit silly.

All powerful messages have some form of absurdity, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty, extravagance, or anything that makes communication intriguing.

Otherwise, like giving Fiji water to someone without the label, the messages will lose their flavor.