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.

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.

Corporate identity is more than your logo and color scheme. It is the entire ecosystem through which your organization presents itself to the world. While brand identity focuses narrowly on customer perception, corporate identity encompasses much more, including how employees, investors, and the broader public understand who you are as an organization.

Trust isn't a "nice to have," it's the infrastructure for everything you do. When it's there, everything works, messages land, conversations happen, and people want what you are offering them. When it is absent, every email becomes suspect, every claim gets scrutinized, and every promise is met with a shrug.

The human brain uses predictable mental shortcuts (heuristics) to navigate overwhelming choices. The question isn't whether these psychological mechanisms exist but how we use them ethically and effectively.

Effective marketing works with, rather than against, four dominant natural patterns.

One of the most valuable things we can do in life is to limit the amount of opinions we have. Why? To start with we consistently overestimate how widely others share our views, beliefs, and behaviors. This false consensus effect drives three problems.

When faced with a deluge of information, many a marketer will fall prey to the data dredging trap, leading to drawing false conclusions from the random patterns that appear. Those patterns can appear remarkably convincing, especially when analyzing multiple variables simultaneously. This "data dredging" effect explains why so many research findings fail to replicate and why misleading correlations flood social media and information outlets

Market sizing blends analytical rigor with strategic judgment. Demand curves defy mathematical functions, data fragments and biases proliferate, and disruptive technologies redraw boundaries overnight. Therefore, responsible practitioners run sensitivity analyses, triangulate top-down and bottom-up approaches, and openly disclose assumptions.

What is most interesting is that we are seeing the shift from making great ads, hoping people remember you later when it's time to buy, to being present in the precise moment someone decides to trust a recommendation, either from an algorithm, a human, or both. When AI recommends Cetaphil on the spot, people buy. Not because they were manipulated, but because they were helped.

When resources tighten, average marketing teams scatter across channels, hoping something sticks. But we know that repeated exposure increases preference, and your audience needs multiple touch points with your message to convert, not single exposures across scattered channels.

You can't force a breakthrough campaign. You can't manufacture genuine brand passion. But you can plant seeds and create the environment where marketing mastery grows. Those seeds might not sprout for months or years. Plant enough seeds and tend the soil consistently, and breakthroughs will bloom.

• Is it testable?
• Can you prove or disprove it?
•If you reversed your hypothesis, would you care about the difference it would make to your overall logic?
• If you shared your hypothesis with any other stakeholder, would it sound naive or obvious?
• Does it point directly to an action or actions that you might take?