Magical thinking: The belief that actions will produce certain outcomes without evidence to suggest they will.
Magical thinking is a common human phenomenon. While it’s often associated with superstitious thought, it isn’t limited to such obvious examples. Individuals make decisions every day based on hope, fear, faith, and other guiding principles. Without diving deep into the philosophical, I’ll say that this ability to act without over thinking can be good thing – a vital tool for human behavior. But, as with any tool, it has a varying degrees of utility. Behaviors driven by magical thinking can range from inspirational acts of goodness to crippling obsessions, but are often not so dramatic. For example, status quo is often perpetuated when people believe, without solid evidence, that there is nothing they can do to change their situation; this is simpy magical thinking from a negative angle.
Avoiding undesirable behaviors driven by magical thinking is plenty challenging for humans as individuals, though manageable because each is of one mind and in control of his or her actions. This challenge is far greater for companies because organizational behaviors are complex, involving many minds that rule many humans as they strive to act collectively toward common goals. While this post focuses on Marketing, you’ll likely find undesirable behaviors driven by magical thinking in business anywhere you see ongoing unproductive practices that have been accepted as the norm, frequently missed deadlines, and distracted teams that must regularly produce acts of heroism to complete their work.
One of the most common appearances of magical thinking about Marketing is the assumption that some clever message or big idea will produce great results without considering how the message will reach the right people, what it costs to reach certain large numbers of people, what percent tend to respond, what percent tend to buy, what percent will even pay attention, and similar marketing realities.
In nearly every company I’ve worked for over the last 25 years, at least one person has seriously suggested to me that a Super Bowl commercial would be a great way to get the word out about our company. It has been a matter of months, not years, since a member of the leadership team in a company, where I was CMO, said “we should do a viral video”. The same person mentioned a Super Bowl ad at least 5 times. If that makes you chuckle a bit, read on. If you see no humor in it, I absolutely implore you to read on.
Marketing ideas abound, from everyone, all the time. Despite what you might infer from the tone of that last paragraph, I don’t think of this inherently as a negative. In fact, I love new ideas and I love it when people think big. I’ll also note that in my nearly 3 decades leading Marketing and growth functions, the number of times I’ve seen a new big idea for Marketing perform better than a well-planned, well-executed integrated campaign is exactly zero. That doesn’t mean great, viable ideas haven’t been brought forth and implemented; rather, it means that Marketing works differently than many people believe it does.
A commonly-held but misplaced belief is that Marketing is mostly about convincing humans to like something, believe something, or buy something. Magical thinking clouds this perception further with an irresistible temptation to ignore everything we know about human decision-making and focus mostly on Marketing at the point of purchase or decision. This view of Marketing narrows it to the human behavioral/emotional components of decision-making and belief, and then narrows it further into the realm of forcing decisions with a single tactic – right now. i.e. what can we say or do that is so awesome that people will believe or do what we want? And if one assumes that is the question, it’s human nature for people to suggest answers…and to use themselves as test subjects, samples of one, to judge their own awesome ideas. I would totally believe or buy if I saw a company do/say that!
In reality, effective Marketing doesn’t depend on perfect and outrageously clever individual tactics nor does it depend on gut-instinct to hone them; instead, it depends on interconnected tactics and messages working together for audiences at different stages of their purchase journey. It relies on response and engagement data to guide decisions about optimizing results by tweaking messages or tactics.
It may be fun to think of Marketing as its most entertaining manifestations, but it’s not useful. In some companies, this misconception is so pervasive that it is harmful. It limits growth because it encourages a continual impatience with Marketing tactics at the top and middle of the funnel and creates a flow of requests to change tactics at the point of purchase, distracting and derailing complex integrated full-funnel Marketing campaigns. It is a bit like defining Finance as “receiving money”. Everyone loves when money comes in; getting money is awesome, but it’s not an operational definition of Finance. Treating it as such and insisting the department focus most of its efforts accordingly would be a pretty poor practice.
A presentation to 10,000 people – to reinforce this point about Marketing, consider the following fictional scenarios about the work required to prepare for an important presentation:
Scenario 1: You are invited to give a presentation at an industry conference to 10,000 people about your product. What do you do? You craft the most impactful 30-minute audience experience. You carefully plan the words, delivery, visuals, and sound to captivate, entertain, engage and convince. This makes perfect sense; you are designing something for maximum impact on your audience. This is how many people want to think about Marketing. In reality, Marketing challenges are not like at all like this. For example, they don’t start with a captive audience who is ready to be convinced.
Scenario 2: In order for your company to succeed, you MUST give a presentation to 10,000 people who would likely buy your product. There is no audience registered for this presentation, nor is there a venue. Many who might be interested in your presentation know nothing about your company or product. What do you do? While your presentation is important, you know the bigger challenge will be getting that huge qualified audience gathered somewhere, ready to hear your pitch. Your approach will require answers to questions like:
- Who are likely buyers?
- Where do they live?
- How do I reach them?
- How many will I need to reach to get 10,000 attendees?
- Do that many likely buyers exist within reasonable distance of an available venue for a presentation?
- What would compel them to attend or even engage with my message?
- How many times will I need to reach them to engage them?
- Can I afford to reach that many people with that frequency?
- What do I want the 10,000 people to know or believe before I give my presentation?
- AND ultimately, if 10,000 likely buyers experience the presentation, do we believe we’ll get enough actual purchases to justify the cost of everything involved?
Marketing is like scenario 2, but much more complex. While people experience marketing as communication-related instances, it is really a science of optimizing these instances for performance within parameters that must be determined and continually re-determined as they change. Such parameters include who your likely buyers are, where they are, how to reach them, how to engage them, how to build credibility with them, when and why they buy, when and why they don’t buy, where they are in their buying cycle, targeting people with messages that align to their stage in the buying cycle, what messages work, what messages don’t work, what channels work, and so on.
YAWN…right? Well, maybe for some. Personally – I love science, measurement, data and math. That’s why I love Marketing.
But what about art and creativity in Marketing? In addition to being a data nerd, I’m a lifelong musician and artist. Creativity plays a big role in my existence, but its role in my Marketing life is different. In normal life, creativity has inherent value. It produces beauty as determined by the eye of the beholder – in other words, its value is determined by each individual for each individual, and varies from person to person. In Marketing, creativity is a tool used to produce attention-getting and convincing things – messages, ads, ideas, videos, etc. The value of these things is not their beauty as judged by each individual, it is performance as judged by data – specifically, how they perform as marketing assets when measured by collective reactions of masses of people.
Humans have a strong urge to measure creative Marketing ideas from their own perspective – their own “eye of the beholder”. While I’ve been clear that Marketing is about the masses, not the individual, I’d like to put a finer point on creativity in Marketing by saying that the value, even as judged by the masses, is still not necessarily about creativity or beauty. It is about reaction and response…not evaluation. I’ll end with this personal example of Marketing evaluation vs. effectiveness:
I don’t care to see another My Pillow commercial. I don’t love the ads. They aren’t especially clever, nor are they entertaining. They run constantly. They’ve kind of worn me out. The logo is a little flowery for my taste. I’m not sure I would have named it “My Pillow” because it becomes difficult to refer to anyone else’s My Pillow…is that YOUR My Pillow or is it MY My Pillow? So there…that is my individual “eye of the beholder” judgment about My Pillow Marketing content. BUT…I own four My Pillows. After friends recommended the product to me, it was actually the awkward name that made it easy to remember. The commercial ultimately reminded me to take action and purchase one. More accurately, the commercial wouldn’t let me forget – it was on constantly. Further commercials informed me about new versions and sizes of the pillow, which I bought. It doesn’t matter if I like the content as entertainment, appreciate it as art, or evaluate it highly as a Marketing expert…it is effective. Enough said? I feel like I deserve a mic drop here.
– Justin
In parts 2 and 3 of this post, I’ll address why Marketing is in this misunderstood state, some of the ways magical thinking about Marketing serve to cripple it in many organizations, and how to get beyond magical thinking to set the stage for high-performance Marketing in any organization.
Part 2
[February 18, 2025]
Why Marketing is So Commonly Misunderstood
As compared to other business functions like Finance, Marketing’s development into a concrete and measurable business discipline is fairly recent. One of the reasons you don’t have people throwing new ideas to Finance every day, looking for magical results is because as a business function it has never been considered to be a magical art. The parallel to Marketing’s Super Bowl ad request might be: Invest every liquid cent in BITCOIN! We’ll triple our money in months! You just don’t hear requests like that of Finance, though I’d love to see the look on a CFO’s face if it happened.
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), a very successful United States merchant and considered by some to be a pioneer in marketing, famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” We’re not far removed from a time when Marketing was almost all guesswork. While this recently-obsoleted state of marketing provided fertile ground for magical thinking, the so-called Marketing experts of old planted the seeds and nurtured the crops. With little ability to measure their results Marketing professionals often took a vague defensive posture, insisting their years of Marketing experience provided them with special knowledge of good and bad Marketing. Without the benefit of such experience, others would likely not understand…they would simply have to trust the Marketing experts, the possessors and keepers of the magical marketing secrets. You see where I’m headed with this, I’m sure.
The old attitudes persist in today’s world of data-driven Marketing; some are even perpetuated by self-proclaimed “Marketing experts”. In reality, Marketing experts are not people who innately know the optimal message or ad that will win the hearts, minds and ultimately dollars of an audience/market. If someone tells you they have such special knowledge, they are full of… well, something other than marketing expertise.
Now that Marketing is so measurable – now that its value can be judged by its performance – true marketing experts treat it as such. Decisions about message, tactics, channels, and spend are made based on performance data. Anecdotally, I’m surprised how rarely the most popular version of an ad (among the experts in the office) performs the best.
How Magical Thinking Cripples Marketing Effectiveness
Earlier in this post I said I had never seen a new big idea for Marketing perform better than a well-planned integrated campaign. This is because Marketing works as a complex system – messages, visuals, channels, response, follow up, and more – all working together. New ideas for Marketing tend to come in as discrete items or single components: a specific event, a video, a commercial, an ad, etc. And this is exactly the disconnect between how people think marketing works and how it actually does. It’s popular to believe Marketing results are driven by extreme creativity, a perfect message, or a singular moonshot tactic. Instead, Marketing produces results because of the message, who sees it, when they see it, how many times they see it, the opportunities they have to respond, the timing of follow up, and myriad other variables. The science of Marketing is complex…not just because it involves influencing human behavior, but because it involves influencing behaviors of unique individuals by communicating with them en masse.
It’s common to envision a target audience as a large group of people with a fairly homogenous state of mind. This foundational assumption is what gets people erroneously focused on individual tactics and messages they believe will be effective in convincing the audience to take action. The reality is quite different. While a target audience shares certain characteristics, each individual differs in ways that are very important in determining effective messages and tactics. For example at any given time some potential buyers are ready to purchase, others are open to considering a purchase, some are not thinking about it, and many are not at all interested. The “Buyers Pyramid” from Chet Homes proposes buying stages and percentages as follows:
With buying stages in mind, it’s easier to see why the purchase conversion focus of messages and tactics designed for the 3% and the 7% would be quite wasted on 60-90% of the audience. Well-planned Marketing campaigns identify and target people based on stages, using appropriate tactics and messages designed to advance people in the buying cycle. Often, this is the context onto which one-off marketing ideas are expected to be overlayed.
I made a point earlier in this post that companies with limited views of Marketing hinder their own growth because they encourage a continual impatience and flow of requests to change tactics at the point of purchase, distracting and derailing complex integrated full-funnel Marketing campaigns. It’s quite possible that a company may have nothing at all they’d describe as well-planned, integrated, full-funnel campaigns to derail. In some organizations, fairly sophisticated Marketing happens every day and it’s isn’t widely known. But even where effective Marketing doesn’t exist, a continual flow of requests based on gut-instinct will only serve to perpetuate current lack of results and distract you from building out Marketing the right way.
In part 3 of this post, I’ll outline key steps to move any Marketing program beyond the magical thinking approach and into the realm of data-driven results.