You, direct response people, know what kind of advertising works and what doesn't work, you know to a dollar. The general advertising people don’t know. […] The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity, which really means originality, the most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising. […] They indulge in entertainment, you know they're wrong. You know to a dollar, they don’t. Why don't you tell them? Why don’t you save them their follies? For two reasons; first because you're impressed by the fact that they’re so big and so well paid and so well-publicized. You're even perhaps impressed by their reputation for creativity whatever that may mean. Second you never meet them. You inhabit a different world. But the chasm between direct response advertising and general advertising is wide. On your side of the chasm I see knowledge and reality. On the other side of the chasm, I see ignorance. You are the professionals. This must not go on. I predict that the practitioners of general advertising are going to start learning from your experience. They're going to start picking your brains. - David Ogilvy

Marketing and the fight game

It’s 2019. We’ve come so far with regards to technology, our knowledge of mathematics, physics, and the scientific process in general.

Yet who’re the experts in human hand to hand combat?

Even though we have all of the above, it’s still the fighters and trainers.

Not the academics. [2]

Why? Because it’s a multi-variate, highly dynamic system and because the fighters and trainers have skin in the game. They get beat up or get fired, respectively.

This creates a Darwinian forcing function that filters out bullshit “martial arts” such as Aikido, Wing Chun, Tai Chi and many more, that only work in a fake environment with a cooperating opponent. But they fail when applied against a non-cooperating opponent.

This is why MMA provides such a good framework for determining which martial arts are actually useful and which are nonsense.

In this context, it’s the fighters and the trainers that are the scientists if we use Richard Feynman’s definition of science:

Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how­ witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked… (Feynman, 1974)

So what’s the best way to learn marketing?

Same as the pilots and the fighters; have a forcing function that filters out bullshit.

That forcing function is ‘did you accomplish your goal?’

If your goal is to create demand, did your method succeed?

If your goal is to attract more paying customers, did your method succeed?

Because marketing is now basically synonymous with bullshit copycat, interchangeable campaigns I’ve stopped using the word altogether.

It has such a negative connotation created by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing that it’s beyond repair.

I’ve argued many times that the future will be pragmatic behavioral psychology, which I also call The Dutch School of Marketing:

Behavioral psychology means understanding how humans behave and how you can influence that.

Pragmatic means that it’s non-theoretical, directly applied to the real world, measured, and most importantly judged on its effectiveness. (This avoids the expert problem.)

This (making people want something they don’t want) is the most complex domain.

An essay about Pragmatic Behavioral Psychology (or Dutch School) is forthcoming. In it, I’ll offer a precise definition as well as the four categories (Archeology, Demand Creation, Demand Amplification, and Context Changing) and how their application.



How do you make people want something they don’t want?

There are so few people left who can do this that many wise people erroneously believe it’s impossible.

In Silicon Valley, you will almost constantly hear how it’s impossible to do that and instead, you should ‘find something people want first and then use marketing to scale it’.

Reducing marketing to mere Demand Amplification. This implies that the only way to create economic value is by means of technology: figuring out what people want and making it. That would be mistaken. Psychological Economic Value Creation is another way through which it is possible to create value; you figure out what you have and find a way to make people want it. This is the core thesis of the essay series Why Your Business Needs More Weird Ideas.

It’s good advice, but generalized it’s taken as: it’s impossible to change the person, you can only change the product.

But getting a culture to stop poaching endangered animals in order to sell useless potions: The Chinese appetite is making American turtles extinct,

or stopping people from overfishing: The most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century,

or being a big business sitting on a ton of assets that have low demand: Conjuring Up Value: Why You Want An Engagement Ring,

are ‘marketing’ problems… Or to use my definition, pragmatic behavioral psychology problems.

You can’t fix this with an app. And you can’t fix this with an SEO campaign and some Facebook ad band-aids.





Notes

[1] This is one thing I dislike so much about our current facade of applied logic. I can post-rationalize pretty much everything. This is hindsight bias in a nutshell. It’s not hard to ‘predict’ the past after it has already unfolded. It’s easy to connect the dots looking backward. But the power of a good framework lies in its predictive power of events that haven’t yet unfolded. In this context, it becomes much more apparent that humans display a lot of behavior that doesn’t qualify as logical and which we Younglings refer to as counter-logical.

[2] The point is not that academia can’t offer any insight whatsoever. But rather that there needs to be some intellectually, rigorous mechanism that serves as a forcing function to filter out false theories. In flying, it’s plane crashes. In fighting, it’s getting beaten up and losing. This filters out pseudo-scientific ideas.

[3] The Sokal Affair (1996) comes to mind in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted a nonsensical paper to an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies to test the intellectual rigor of the editors and the mechanisms in place. It got published and the hoax wasn’t revealed until Professor Sokal revealed it. Needless to say, many people were not amused. Me, personally… I laughed my ass off.

References

Feynman, R. (1974). Cargo Cult Science. Retrieved 6 March 2020, from http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Taleb, N. (2010). The Black Swan (2nd ed., p. 302). New York: Random House Publishing Group.