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.…
Book Review : The Illusion of Choice by Richard Shotton. Many of us like to think our buying choices are thoughtful, logical, and completely our own. Richard Shotton’s The Illusion of Choice shows us that this belief is a bit too optimistic. It turns out that many of our choices are influenced less by logic…
Why do two departments pursuing the same goal occasionally behave like rival civilisations? If you spend enough time around growing businesses, you eventually discover one of the great mysteries of modern commerce. Marketing wants more leads. Sales wants better leads. Marketing believes sales doesn’t follow up quickly enough. Sales believes marketing sends people who downloaded…
One of the questions I get asked most often by listeners of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing is surprisingly simple: “What equipment and software do you use to make the podcast?” The truth is that while there are endless options available for podcasters today, my setup is intentionally straightforward. Rather than chasing the latest…
Why do human beings continue making business decisions like human beings despite decades of effort to prevent it? There is a persistent belief in some corners of the business world that B2B marketing should be entirely rational. After all, businesses are not people. Businesses do not have emotions. Businesses do not become excited, nervous, curious,…
Why the next decade of marketing may be simultaneously more technological and more human than anyone expected. Predicting the future has always been a risky business. Entire industries have been built around making confident forecasts that later proved to be spectacularly incorrect. In the 1950s, people imagined we’d all be commuting to work in flying…
Why do humans continue to trust other humans despite everything we know about humans? There was once a time when marketing was relatively straightforward. A company would create an advertisement. The advertisement would tell people how wonderful the company was. The company would then wait patiently for customers to arrive. Sometimes customers came, sometimes they…
Book Review : Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut. There’s a comforting illusion in marketing that customers are calmly weighing up product features, comparing prices rationally, and making thoughtful purchasing decisions based entirely on logic. Nancy Harhut’s Using Behavioral Science in Marketing makes it clear that this idea is mostly a myth. Honestly,…
How a small brand with a teapot can sometimes outperform a corporation with a helicopter. A lot of businesses hope that marketing will work like a lightning strike: one campaign, one ad, one viral post, or one brilliant moment that changes everything overnight. While this idea is tempting, it rarely happens in real life. Most…