Marketing Schizophrenia and the Persuasion Paradigm
Just back from a session with Nottingham Business School’s marketing faculty (thanks to Debbie Roberts for the invitation!). I presented them with two basic ideas.
The first is that marketing suffers from a bad case of in-built schizophrenia. On the one hand, it’s all about ‘identifying and meeting customer needs’, which involves getting organisations to do what their customers want them to do. On the other hand, it’s also all about ‘changing attitudes and behaviours’, ‘building brand loyalty’ and so on – in other words persuading and influencing customers to do what the organisation wants them to do. So marketing is trying to do two opposite things at the same time. My suggestion was that the second ‘persuasion paradigm’ aspect of marketing is basically a waste of time and money for both sides, customer and company. (http://www.rightsideup.net/?p=13)
The second idea followed from the first. Behind consumers’ needs (and desires) for products and services we have an even bigger, deeper ‘meta’ need – for help in making and implementing better decisions. This need for ‘decision making support’ is a huge untapped market: potentially the biggest market in the world, because ultimately we all want to make better decisions about every aspect of our lives. However, thanks to its persuasion paradigm, marketing has signally failed to address this need or even to recognise that it exists. For this reason, from the perspective of the consumer/customer, marketing is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Surprisingly (!), the assembled professors and PhD students didn’t seem to like my ideas. I got pushback on two fronts. First, they didn’t like my ‘schizophrenia’ observation. It’s not what they read in the textbooks. It’s not what they teach. That’s fine by me. Virtually everything you read about marketing focuses on what marketers should be doing, or how they should do it. There’s hardly anything out there about what marketers actually do. I was talking about my observations about what marketers do, and therefore what marketing actually does.
The second piece of pushback was far more interesting. According to my thesis, helping individuals make and implement better decisions is the biggest unexplored market out there; the source of growth for a whole new industry, new types of value creation etc. But the professors weren’t convinced. They had three basic arguments.
First, when I claimed that people want to make and implement better decisions, what many of them heard was that ‘people should make rational decisions, and that marketers should help them’. The word ‘rational’ is important here, because it’s not about being sensible or even logical. It’s a throwback to the bizarre economist fantasy of homo economicus: the pathologically selfish individual, interested only in money/price, with access to perfect information at zero cost.
This raises an important question: if people are never going to be ‘rational’ in the way economists describe, ‘what does better decision making look like?’
The second, related pushback was that in human beings the real decision making processes are largely unconscious, driven by unconscious emotions. The reasons we give for our decisions are just post-rationalisations. So there is no way we can help people make better decisions (especially by offering them more ‘rational’ support).
The third pushback followed from the first two. Given the highly irrational nature of consumer decision-making and the fact that consumers don’t really know what they want, they need to be told what they want by advertisers. As one of the professors said, “I don’t know what I want until the ads tell me”. (I still can’t work out if he had his tongue in his cheek, but it’s certainly the line peddled by advertising luminaries such as Maurice Saatchi. http://www.rightsideup.net/?p=14&cpage=1#comment-18)
Put these three pushbacks together and we have a powerful justification for an ideology of marketing which says: “ ‘we’ (the marketing profession) are clever; ‘they’ (‘the consumer’) are stupid and gullible. ‘We’ deserve to lead ‘them’ by nose.”
I think this ideology is part of the problem for both individuals in their roles as buyers and consumers, and for sellers. It undermines trust and creates friction in the marketplace. However, if the observations supporting it are correct, it may be unavoidable. Just the way things are.
I don’t believe this. Like so many things marketers do, the arguments are muddled and superficial. That’s not to say it’s a hugely complex area. In fact, it’s an intellectual minefield. One false step could blow you away. Nevertheless, we need to enter this minefield and navigate our way through.
Why? Because an thinkably rich prize – a ‘buyer-centric’ commercial system that has helping individuals make and implement better decisions at its operational heart – now beckons.
Alan Mitchell
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