Marketing ISN'T about the numbers

This headline is kind of a lie because yes— ultimately it IS about the numbers. The role of marketing is to sell shit, the end.

But what I mean is this: the fundamental skill of marketing isn’t crunching numbers, it’s understanding human psychology and behavior.

We collectively pretend that people make buying decisions based on price, features and logic, etc— but that’s BS. For the most part people buy based on emotion, then use the facts to justify their decision later

Like when I was 19 and I bought an ugly, bad-fitting shirt from The Gap because “I might have a job interview soon.” Of course, there was no job interview… the truth is, I bought it because the girl who worked there said it looked good on me and I was too nervous to say no when she asked if I wanted to get it 💀

And this applies to B2B buyers just as much as it does to the down-bad 19-year-old version of me:

→ They're busy/tired. Maybe their current solution isn't perfect, but it's good enough and they'd rather go home at 5 than spend another 20 minutes researching other options

→ They're cognitive misers aka lazy. They usually go with the product they've heard of the most ("If everyone else is using it, it's probably fine").

→ They get scared. If their company just had a bunch of layoffs, are they likely to take chances on a new product/vendor that could make them look bad in their next review?

The spreadsheet says “Logically superior product, strong ROI.” The very human buyer says “I just survived a re-org and haven’t eaten lunch— I’m just gonna renew the thing we already use.”

So what’s my point?

Yes, data is helpful. But marketing breakthroughs are very rarely going to come from a SQL query or a spreadsheet alone— they’re going to come from reverse engineering the mind of your buyer.

What you're always looking for is: How do I make this a painkiller, not a vitamin?

If you're not familiar with this framework, the basic idea is simple: Everybody knows they SHOULD take their vitamins… but they don't. On the other hand, if your head or back hurts really bad right now, you'll pay just about any amount of money to make the pain stop.

Selling vitamins is TOUGH, because it means you’re fighting against two very powerful parts of human psychology:

• Optimism bias: People generally overestimate their odds of success

• Temporal discounting: The perceived value of a reward goes down, the further into the future it is

This means any kind of offer where the premise is based on preventing future pain is basically dead in the water— so find a way to flip that so it’s solving an acute pain point that’s blocking them from doing something important RIGHT NOW.

For example, here’s two ways to position the same offer:

❌ “We’ll help you identify security gaps and fill them before they become a problem”

✅ “We identify the exact root cause of critical security issues and fix them once and for all, so they're never a problem again.”

The first one sounds like something you probably should do, but is realistically never going to make it to the top of the priority stack. Optimism bias will tell people that their security is good enough and they probably won't have any problems. And temporal discounting will quietly whisper in their ear that it’s more important to build new features that they can sell today.

But the second one? When you have a critical security issue, it's everybody's number one priority until it's fixed! Give them the solution to a crisis, and they’ll be grateful to throw money at you— nobody wants to pay for a gym membership, but they’ll pay $300 for a chiropractor to fix the thing the gym would’ve prevented.

And this is why you have to ruthlessly push yourself to make every offer a painkiller in the mind of your buyer— wthout that, you're just playing on hard mode.

My point:

Yes, data is helpful. But it's never going to hand you the answer on a silver platter. That will always and only come from understanding human psychology.

Also, shoutout to the girl at The Gap— thanks for teaching me that people don’t buy things, they buy feelings.

She made the sale. I made the mistake. And you learned something 🫡

PS - If you like my emails, reply to this and say hi! I don’t have any room for new clients right now so I have nothing to sell you, but I always like talking with people.