Marketing alchemy

Why bang on about consumer decision-making?
Because it’s where, historically, marketing took a most damaging wrong turn.

 

 

Philip Kotler is the greatest of all
marketing theorists and teachers. Today’s generation of senior marketers were
weaned on his text books – books like The Principles of Marketing,
and Marketing Management.

 

 

There are two passages in my edition of
Principles of Marketing that caught my eye. The first says:

 

“The central
question for marketers is: How to consumers respond to various marketing
efforts the company might use? …The starting point is the stimulus-response
model of buyer behaviour … [where] marketing and other stimuli enter the
consumer’s ‘black box’ and produce certain responses. Marketers must figure out
what it is in the buyer’s black box.”

 

 

The second says:

 

“Marketers should
study buyers to find out how they actually evaluate brand alternatives. If they
know what evaluative processes go on, marketers can take steps to influence the
buyer’s decision.”

 

Let’s read that again: “If marketers know
what evaluative processes go on [in the consumer’s black box], marketers can
take steps to influence the buyer’s decision.” This single sentence sums up and
pretty much defines a large part of marketing’s agenda for the last 50 years. But
if we test it against marketing’s core mission – to identify and meet consumer
needs and wants – we find a contradiction. Consumers don’t want marketers to
influence their decisions. They want to make a better decision according to
their own lights.

 

 

This quest to influence consumer decisions
the way marketers want is a) a denial of the core principles of marketing and
b) sets marketers against their customers
rather than working with or for them.

 

 

I’ll say that again, just to be
absolutely clear. The marketing agenda
of influencing consumer decisions – of changing consumer attitudes and
behaviours – sets marketers against
their customers. It destroys trust and creates an adversarial relationship
instead.

 

 

That’s one of the legacies of Kotler. Now
let’s look again at those two little paragraphs. What they do is create a
complete, logically consistent, hermetically-sealed agenda which boils down to
three core challenges:

 

- – -  the quest for insights that will deliver stimuli (such as brand ‘messages’)
capable of changing attitudes and behaviours

 

- – - designing,
constructing and delivering these stimuli
efficiently and effectively

 

- – -  measuring
the resulting responses.

 

 

This agenda has pretty much defined
marketers’ day job for decades. After all, It all so sounds sensible, realistic
and practical. In fact, content-wise, it’s no more advanced than the alchemists’
quest to turn lead into gold.

 

 

The alchemists pursued their quest to
turn lead into gold because they had a theory which told them they could. This
theory was based on an understanding that earth, air, fire and water were the fundamental
building blocks of nature, their inner natures being defined by whether they
were moist/dry or hot/cold.

 

 

Marketers pursued their quest to mould
consumer attitudes and behaviours because they had a theory which told them
could. This was the behaviourist theories of psychology referred to by Kotler; a
theory that told them that human minds were like pieces of putty just waiting
to be ‘conditioned’ and moulded, at will, by external stimuli.

 

 

Behaviourism is now discredited. But the
behaviourist agenda Kotler outlined for marketing lives on regardless.

 

 

This quest for ‘consumer insight’ is a
good example. The good side of insight is all about alignment – understanding consumer
needs and wants better to meet these needs better. The alchemical side of
insight is the quest for knowledge as power over things, as a lever of control.
Once you know how something works, you can reach inside its workings and change
it. You can bend it to your will, turning lead into gold, changing consumer
attitudes and behaviours in your favour. It all sounds very ‘scientific’. Yet, like
the alchemists, marketers have spent decades looking for the philosopher’s
stone of the perfect insight leading to the perfect stimulus to deliver the
right responses in vain … because it does not exist.

 

 

In fact, all the research of the last 30 years
or so actually points us in the opposite direction. When we at last looked inside
the consumer’s ‘black box’, far from discovering a piece of putty waiting to be
moulded by marketing stimuli, we discovered a highly sophisticated survival
machine which had evolved over millions of years to be pretty much hard-wired,
and impervious to externally imposed change.

 

 

If anything the real vector of ‘stimulus’
and ‘response’ is in the opposite direction: marketers do the things they do
because these are things that fit the ways consumers behave. The way consumers
make decisions has moulded the way marketers do marketing. Thus for example:

 

 

- – - The
satisfying spike in sales following a price promotion is not proof of the power
of marketers to change consumer behaviour; it’s proof of the power of consumer
behaviour to change marketing. Marketers change their prices to fit the behaviours
of consumers looking for better value. The sun does not orbit the earth. The
earth orbits the sun.

 

 

- – - Most of the
‘effects’ of advertising are not the effects of a message embedding itself in
the brain to change perceptions and emotions thereby triggering behaviour
change. They are by-products of unchanging brain processes such as the workings
of awareness, which goes a long way to explaining both the demonstrable
‘effectiveness’ of advertising and the
relatively limited nature of these effects.

 

 

Yet, as with alchemy, the very way the
theory is constructed renders it impossible to distinguish truth from error. The
alchemists believed if they made something softer, more yellow, or heavier,
then they were making progress towards their goal of making gold. So that’s
what they did: experiments to make things softer, yellower, or heavier. But it
wasn’t progress at all.

 

 

If you think that what you are doing is
changing consumer attitudes and behaviours, then every time you make a
measurement you will interpret it in terms of how much change you have created.
You will interpret the promotional sales uplift as ‘proof’ of your ‘power’ to
change consumer behaviour – rather than proof of the fact that you have changed
what you do to align to the power of the consumer. Your measurements will give
you ‘evidence’ of the success you are looking for.

 

 

The short and the long of it is that the
marketing agenda of ‘influencing buyer decisions’ has been nothing
but an awfully long, damaging and wasteful wild goose chase. The main reason
marketers are so attached to this agenda is that they would be bereft without
it: “if changing attitudes and behaviours is not our job, then what is?”

 

 

To successfully reinvent marketing, we
have to find an answer to this question. (Hint: it’s all about alignment.) If you really feel the need to stick with marketer’s role as influencer, try thinking of it in terms of Newton or Aristotle. Aristotle said the natural state of things was to be at rest, so he had to explain motion – in terms of a Prime Mover. Newton said the natural state of things is motion, the fact of which is obscured by the existence of friction. Are marketers the Prime Movers of markets, or are consumers – human beings – always in motion, looking for value? Sometimes, things get in the way of consumers’ quest for value. The question for marketers is whether we want to be a source of friction in the process, or a source of value within it.

 

 

 

Alan
Mitchell      www.ctrl-shift.co.uk
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