Many in marketing are making decisions based on psychological assumptions that don't hold up. Why would we do this? It is not stemming from carelessness, but rather myths spread faster than corrections. You and I have both seen the compelling story get a million shares while the replication failure gets twelve at best. What's that? You'd like specific examples of less credible psychological reasoning we rely on to inform some of our decisions. My pleasure.

Imagine that time when the brief needed a direction or the budget needed to be locked in, and somewhere between the deadline and the room full of people waiting on you, a decision gets made only because making it feels like moving forward and provides a sense of relief. It could turn out to be right, but leaving it to chance is a tactical error predicated on a faulty strategy.

We're living through an era saturated with empathy, or at least, the performance of it, where organizations champion psychological safety, leaders demonstrate vulnerability, and entire frameworks are built around understanding feelings. Yet for all this empathetic effort, people seem more entrenched in their positions than ever. That seems odd. Or is it?

This may just be what happens when empathy becomes unproductive, and the goals shift from understanding to validation and clarity to comfort. When we elevate the mere expression of concern over the harder work of actually moving something forward, we end up with a dynamic in which society prizes victimhood and avoids accountability, in which being understood matters more than being challenged.

That is probably obvious.

But asking open follow-up questions is one of the easiest ways to uncover deeper insights about how your marketing campaigns resonate with your target audience. Of course, the principal difficulty with them is coming up with the questions themselves in the moment. I've shared a range of questions that are widely applicable across many marketing research conversations.

Despite the beliefs of some psychologists and promises of Martech vendors, nothing related to human psychology and behavior is absolutely quantifiable. Nothing. But we live in an era of attribution models, conversion funnels, and predictive analytics, complete with dashboards that promise precision and a clear course of action. This mathematical certainty is largely an illusion because we human beings aren't equations. We're messy, contradictory, and influenced by thousands of unmeasurable variables, including the fight someone had that morning, the song in their head, the memory triggered by your brand color, and the cultural context they bring to your message.

Anchor beliefs are convictions that remain fixed even when faced with contradictory evidence, and we all have them. Strong beliefs shouldn't be wishy-washy and flip completely based on moderate counter-evidence, they should adjust somewhat. When they don't budge at all, it's worth asking yourself, "If this belief were false, would I want to know?" While these beliefs aren't necessarily wrong, and many are accurate, the problem is that they are held as if indisputable truths rather than hypotheses open to revision.

Marketers routinely invoke psychological concepts to explain consumer behavior and design campaigns. We speak about "creating FOMO," "leveraging social proof," and "avoiding cognitive dissonance." But many psychological terms don't mean what marketers think they mean.

Misunderstanding psychological mechanisms leads to misapplied strategies, wasted budgets, and failed campaigns. Worse, it leads to unethical practices based on flawed assumptions about how influence works.

Guess what? When your audience doesn't respond, adding more messaging usually makes it worse. This usually means when you notice campaign performance dropping, you assume the problem is insufficient explanation, and that assumption right there is costing you conversions.

We don't misunderstand our customers because we lack intuition. We misunderstand because we don't ask. You might feel like you know your audience well enough to understand how they think, what they want, and how they make decisions. You don't. Did you know that people in relationships who assumed they already understood someone were no more accurate than strangers at decoding ambiguous statements? The relationship didn't increase accuracy, but it increased confidence. Let's allow that to percolate for a moment.

Your Decisions Are Shaped Before You Ever Make Them

We marketers have built entire functions around the assumption that choice happens in the moment, at the shelf, on the landing page, during the demo. Unfortunately, choice isn't a point-in-time event. It's the endpoint of a long chain of impressions, exposures, and associations accumulating long before your customer enters an active buying cycle. You're probably thinking this is just semantic. It's not. Why? Because you aren't just competing for attention in-market engineering, you're trying to shape the mental habitat in which their selection feels inevitable.

Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth in marketing. Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.

If you've spent any time trying to change minds, you've probably heard this advice: stories beat statistics. Sure, a well-told personal story, especially one that reveals harm or hardship, cuts through in ways that data rarely does because people connect with narrative, remember it, and even feel it. But not everyone processes information the same way.

Yes, it's important to keep abreast of the latest technological developments and tools of the moment for reasons that are not germane to this musing. And it is equally important to read (or listen to) books that reveal the consistent and pervasive variables of human nature. Why? Because within those books are timeless truths that will help you better understand how to communicate in an impactful and even meaningful way with the audience you seek to serve.

84% of purchase decisions are made before shopping even begins, according to new research tracking 1.2 million consumer journeys across 200+ categories, meaning that by the time your prospect actively shops, the decision is already made.

Over months and years, your favorite and not-so-favorite brands build neural pathways beneath your conscious awareness so that when the buying moment arrives, what feels like a rational choice is actually the echo of impressions accumulated long ago.

You probably aren't feeling weighed down by a lack of opportunity or talent. Or maybe you are. And most of us are a bit buried under the things we haven't let go of, including the habits we've stopped questioning, the patterns we keep feeding, the noise we mistake for progress.