I wrote today in Marketing magazine about discoveries in psychology that are revolutionising our understanding of human decision-making.

Many marketers are seizing upon these findings as grist to the mill of marketing’s prevailing persuasion paradigm. I think the opposite is true. As we dig deeper, I think we’ll find that these discoveries point us in a very different direction.

Here’s a parallel. Aristotle said the natural state of matter was rest, and for 2000 years everyone believed him – a belief that acted as a highly effective block to further learning.

To explain motion, Aristotle had to invent a Prime Mover. Then Newton came along and turned Aristotle on his head. Newton said the natural state of matter is motion. There is a separate explanation for things whose movement has been blocked – friction. Friction doesn’t do away with the underlying reality of matter in motion, it simply helps to mask this reality – it helps explain why we have so much ‘evidence’ of matter being at a state of rest.

Modern marketing is victim of an illusion of Aristotleian proportions. The illusion goes like this. ‘The consumer’ is a basically an inert entity which is motionless unless moved by marketers’ stimuli. Marketers are the Prime Movers of markets.

‘Effective’ marketing delivers the right ‘stimulus’ – advertising, promotion, sampling, branding, etc – to get the right ‘response’ (where the right response is when the consumer does what the marketer wants her to do).

In reality, human beings are restlessly active in the search for value in their lives – always in motion. They are the prime movers of markets, and for them, the essence of value lies in the ability to make and implement better decisions. This is their natural state.

But there is a second layer of friction which helps mask this natural state: the fact that consumers are indeed open to various forms of persuasion and influence. The existence of this second layer doesn’t do away the underlying reality. As I said, it simply helps to mask it, making things a little more complicated.

When marketers attempt to influence consumers’ decisions to suit their own corporate goals – when they interrupt, obstruct and divert consumers’ from their natural decision-making processes – they are creating marketplace friction. In the consumer’s eyes, this is value-destroying, not value adding.

That’s why, in lay circles among people who don’t know better, marketers are so unpopular. In fact, they do know better.

 
To navigate our way through this intellectual maze we need to remember some important points, such as:

•    ‘Better decisions’ are not the same as ‘rational’, pink-elephant decisions. A better decision is one that helps an individual achieve a desired goal better. This goal may be emotional and ‘irrational’ as well as ‘rational’.

•    Not all marketing creates friction, some of it helps remove friction.

•    Judging marketing ‘effectiveness’ from a ‘stimulus-response’ perspective (‘how effective were we in getting them to respond to our stimuli in ways that we want?’) is a sure-fire way of never being able to distinguish between marketing that adds consumer value and marketing that destroys consumer value. It’s a perfect recipe for non-progress. This is what I alluded to in my articles and blogs about Mad Sheep Rage.

Once we have made our way through this maze, we will have arrived at a point we can start reinventing marketing (at last!) .

I’ll outline that agenda tomorrow.

Alan Mitchell      www.ctrl-shift.co.uk