Why do humans continue doing delightfully irrational things like talking about good service twenty years later? Businesses have a strange pattern that economists have tried to explain for years. A company can have the best product. The lowest price. The fastest delivery. The slickest website. Even the most advanced CRM, created by people who love…
Why do some companies grow like rockets while others spend three hours debating the colour of a button? It’s interesting how two companies in the same industry can sell similar products, target the same customers, and have equally smart teams, yet have very different results. Still, one company takes off quickly while the other spends…
Marketing now seems to have more channels than most televisions. There was once a simpler time. If you wanted to market a business, you placed an advert in a trade magazine, attended an exhibition, printed an alarming number of brochures, and hoped someone important wandered past your stand while searching for free pens. Life had…
Artificial intelligence has quietly entered the marketing world, changed everything around, and now everyone is left wondering how to find their way forward. A question is quietly circulating in boardrooms, marketing teams, agencies, and among business owners: “Is any marketing actually worth the money any more?” It’s a fair question. After all, the rules seem…
Why having something interesting to say remains surprisingly effective in an age of endless content. In the past, being seen as an expert meant years of experience, deep knowledge, published work, public speaking, and professional achievements. Sometimes, even growing a wise-looking beard helped, whether or not you actually had all the answers. Today, things work…
Why customers continue ignoring perfectly logical marketing plans. One of the more curious assumptions in modern marketing is the belief that customers behave rationally. This assumption appears everywhere. It appears in sales funnels. It appears in customer journeys. It appears in marketing plans, boardroom presentations, and dashboards containing enough charts to make a statistician weep…
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,…
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…