The Weekly Spark #5: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product/service fits him and sells itself” Peter Drucker

What do IQOS cigarettes, vegan hamburgers, and placebo pills have in common? They all leverage conscious and subconscious pattern-matching strategies to tell their users a story that resonates with their beliefs: you are smoking a cigarette, you are eating a hamburger, you are taking medicine. Except for the fact that it’s not actually the case.

Humans are pattern-matching machines – we work by recognizing patterns based on what we know or have experienced, either consciously or subconsciously. As irrational beings, most of the time it’s actually the unconscious part of our brain that makes the decision and then we use rationality to justify the choice. For example, the reason why we all kind of like “commercial music” is because it’s mostly built rearranging the same beats, notes and 4/4 time – it sounds familiar and thus we feel an immediate connection to it. This all sums up into the concept that, from how we’re made, we cannot understand something that isn’t based on the world as we know it: in the Western countries it will be surely easier to sell a new chocolate bar flavor than edible crickets.

Changing our beliefs is something we rarely do.

Most of the time we look for patterns that match our habits. When we find a pattern match, we can embrace it without re-evaluating our beliefs. Nevertheless this doesn’t mean that we’re not capable of innovating or doing something better than it was done before: it’s a matter of finding a new way of combining old ideas. In marketing terms, we need to consider where our target audience is starting from (who’s it for? What is their worldview?), where we want to take them (what is the change we are seeking?), and which story we are going to tell them to get them there (what does this remind them of? How can they feel the connection?). Getting someone to make new decisions and finding new ways of being into the world always need to benefit from a pattern to match and a powerful story: Airbnb and Uber are two great examples of disruption. ???

It's tempting to improve the world by creating new beliefs. But it’s far more reliable to match them.

This concept is not only real in marketing, but is applicable in a variety of fields. For instance, if you build great habits for yourself, you grant access to a different set of patterns and beliefs vs someone else. Nevertheless, patterns will most likely always be linked to your culture (i.e. the collective story we tell ourselves) and its inherent definition of “normal”. Clearly this is not a static picture, but rather a dynamic one as change is inherent in humans (we’ll expand on this interesting topic next week!). Getting from point A to point B is always possible…if you match the right patterns. ?