Marketers Can’t Afford To Treat Consumers Like Computers
If, as a marketer, you don’t understand that consumers look for information that validate their beliefs, “you have absolutely no chance in the marketplace,” says strategic adviser and author Tom Asacker.
Many marketers operate under the false assumption that people behave like computers, expecting them to make decisions based simply on the information they’re supplied, according to Tom Asacker, a keynote speaker, strategic adviser, and author of five books, including “The Business of Belief.”
But it just doesn’t work that way. “When you dig deep enough into it, you find out that human beings are driven by their perceptions and their desires. You add that up and you’ve got beliefs,” Asacker said. “Their feelings, their perceptions, their desires are what end up giving them this feeling of knowing. Then they look for information to validate that.”
If you don’t understand that, he added, then “you have absolutely no chance in the marketplace.”
Highlights from this week’s “Marketing Today” podcast include:
- How’s the water? Understanding how decisions are made and why consumers do what they do. (1:35)
- Breaking the chains of habit: What is the “something else” that drives people’s decision making? (5:15)
- The lightbulb of confusion: Marketers don’t understand it’s unexpected events that trigger consumer learning. (7:20)
- Can you get 29 million TED Talk views and still be wrong? (12:30)
- Doing what your inner voice tells you to do. (17:00)
- New business models: Identifying sustainable value. (18:25)