I’ve spent more than 20 years in marketing. Every year I discover new things that make me seriously question the beliefs I’ve previously held and the decisions I’ve made along the way. It’s pretty humbling.
I’ve been lucky, though. I’ve been tasked to manage some truly wonderful brands. To create new ones. To take a stab at troubled ones. Was given the opportunity to build a marketing lab. To create hundreds of experiments. Test theories. And I got up-close with some of the world’s finest marketers, incredible people who challenged and changed how I think.
I’ve had both successes and failures. While I’ve enjoyed the pleasure success brought, the failures are more interesting. To be absolutely clear on this: I’d rather not fail. Nobody wants to, I don’t care what they say. But we do fail. More than we admit. Often more than we even know. I’m convinced that our failures teach us more about our own decision-making than our successes do… if we let them.
Predicting how people will respond to our marketing initiatives is genuinely difficult. There are few laws that give us predictable results every time. Ideally we are trying to accurately predict what will happen. I’d wager a bet that much of the time we don’t even know afterwards. Isolating and measuring the full effect of our activity is not easy. We often move on without truly knowing. Or worse, we move on thinking that the decisions we made were effective, when they were not. And when we’re making the decision, the right answer isn’t always intuitive. Not to ourselves and especially not to our non-marketing colleagues. This marketing stuff is messy.
Making products that are more relevant, more efficient and run smoother with less energy consumption
How your KitKat break is helping cocoa-farming families close the living income gap through an innovative programme
Renewable gas will power Ireland’s decarbonised future
All aboard: Ten great things to see and do in Heritage Week
My dad was a doctor, a professor of pathology in Dublin’s Mater hospital. He was a man of science and a teacher. He was a humble, softly-spoken man despite his reputation as one of the world’s most respected pathologists. Whenever I met his students, they would corner me for hours, telling me how much they adored him. A year after he died, University College Dublin created a student award, the Peter Dervan Memorial Medal for Excellence in Cancer Pathology. He was my hero.
If there could be a polar opposite profession to my dad’s, it would be advertising. Which is why he was always intrigued and a little bemused with my interest in advertising from an early age. He claimed that I used to ask him about the ads in his Sunday newspapers when I was as young as 10 or 11. That said, he bought me my first advertising book, Ogilvy on Advertising. Not a bad choice for a man with no marketing experience or knowledge himself.
Medicine and advertising are miles away from each other, but both rely on decision-making. As a pathologist, my dad had to make high-stress decisions on a regular basis. I remember one story where he had to recommend treatment for a young boy who discovered a tumour in his arm. It was growing rapidly. Do you amputate to stop it spreading, or do you treat it and wait, with the risk that the cancer spreads?
Two of the world’s most famous pathologists advised the parents that they should amputate. My dad disagreed and asked them to wait. He believed it was benign and would stop growing. The boy’s father bet on my dad and didn’t amputate. It was a good decision. The tumour shrank and the young boy went on to live a healthy life.
The best marketers are what I call ‘fox marketers’. These study the past. They challenge assumptions. They have theories, but look for the evidence. They understand that human behaviour is messy and communications are nuanced
Decisions like this are not just about facts and knowledge. Doctors are human. It is less risky to recommend amputation. If you amputate, you lose the arm, and perhaps save a life – but they wouldn’t know for sure if it was the right decision. If you wait, we find out for sure, but it may be too late. I often wondered, many years later, how he made these decisions under such pressure, week in, week out. How can you become confident in your prediction, while not becoming overconfident? How do you push for the decision you think is correct, when it is personally less risky to go the other direction? I think the answer is because he had all the characteristics of a great decision-maker.
“Study the past,” my dad would tell me over and over. He’d remind me that any fool could learn from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others. But dad was only partly right here. At least when it comes to marketing. We don’t even make fool status. We don’t learn from our own mistakes. We make them over and over. We get blinded by our wedded views about how marketing works. We trip ourselves up with simple schoolboy errors. We believe things without questioning them. And won’t open the door to the possibility that our beliefs are flawed. Ego plays a role. So does fear. As does pain.
But we can learn to make fewer mistakes. The goal genuinely is to learn. Learn to make better decisions over time. The best marketers are what I call ‘fox marketers’. These study the past. They challenge assumptions. They have theories, but look for the evidence. They understand that human behaviour is messy and communications are nuanced. They are sceptical but not cynical. They have strong opinions, but these are loosely held. They are open to discovering that they are wrong. They think, not in certainties, but in probabilities. Which is why they experiment.
While I suspect that many of those marketers that most influenced me were born foxes, I believe these characteristics can be learned. I know this as I was not born a fox.
If I was pushed to offer up just one way to improve decision-making, it would be this: focus on how you react to discovering you are wrong. This I believe is the critical distinction between fox marketers and the rest of us. If you genuinely enjoy understanding why something didn’t work and why your mental model was wrong, you will improve your decision-making. If you find it threatening, I’m betting you won’t.