How to spend three hours studying a dashboard and still have no idea what your customers are thinking. Marketers, business owners, analysts, and anyone who’s ever opened Google Analytics with good intentions all run into the same strange problem. It usually begins innocently enough. You decide to check how a campaign is performing. Five minutes…
How marketing accidentally collected so much information that it occasionally forgot what it was looking for. There was a time when marketers complained about having too little data. Marketers used to launch campaigns with a mix of optimism, intuition, and educated guesses. Weeks later, results would come in, leading to long talks about what worked,…
Book Review : Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara There’s a peculiar tendency in business to treat customer experience as something that happens after the important work is done. Build the product. Deliver the service. Send the invoice. Job done. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara makes…
Marketing would be a lot simpler if customers acted as predictably as spreadsheets. Many people in boardrooms, marketing teams, and strategy meetings share a common wish. Even some optimistic analysts dream about it. It goes something like this: If we collect enough data, build advanced systems, map out detailed customer journeys, and set up plenty…
Why do human beings continue making perfectly irrational decisions while insisting they are being entirely logical? Human beings like to think they are rational. This is one of the most persistent and entertaining misconceptions ever created. Ask someone why they chose a particular supplier, product, restaurant, software platform, or brand, and they will often offer…
Imagine how much simpler marketing would be if every customer came with an instruction manual. Modern marketing has become remarkably good at measuring clicks. We can track who clicked, when they clicked, where they were, what device they used, how long they stayed, which page they visited next, and even how many milliseconds passed before…
Modern marketing has become fixated on numbers, but it still struggles to understand people. Marketers once had almost no data to work with. They would launch campaigns, hope for good results, and wait to see what happened. Results would come in weeks later, often bringing a mix of excitement, confusion, and someone insisting they always…
How businesses can accidentally make themselves forgettable by focusing too much on efficiency. There was a time when efficiency was a relatively straightforward concept. You found a way to do something faster, cheaper, or better. Ideally, all three. Everyone celebrated, productivity increased, and somebody somewhere received a promotion. Simple. Then businesses discovered spreadsheets, and things…
Why human beings continue making emotional decisions while pretending they are being entirely rational. Human beings like to think of themselves as logical creatures. This is one of the most charming myths ever invented. We like to think we carefully look at information, weigh the evidence, compare our options, and make decisions through a logical…
Modern marketing has more data than ever before. We can track clicks, conversions, engagement, user journeys, attribution models and enough metrics to fill an entire dashboard. So why does marketing still feel suspiciously like guesswork? In this episode of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing, Sean Makin explores the uncomfortable gap between data and certainty.…