For all the talk about “customer empathy” as a supreme value in marketing, marketers are surprisingly bad at deploying it.
And by that, I mean, it’s very common for a marketer to think about their preferences and apply them broadly to their customer base or to the market more broadly.
This is called the False Consensus Effect. Here’s how ChatGPT described it for me:
“The false consensus effect is when people believe that their opinions, beliefs, or behaviors are more common than they actually are.
In marketing, this can lead businesses to assume that everyone thinks like them, so they design campaigns that appeal to their own tastes rather than their customers’.”
Think about the messaging you see on a daily basis on LinkedIn and on podcasts.
- “People don’t want to talk to sales, they just want to use the product.”
- “People don’t want to fill out forms, they want to use a chatbot.”
- “Hey 2014 called and wants its inbound strategy back – no one reads ebooks anymore!”
- “Cold emails don’t work; I’ve never opened one.”
- “Search is dying; I’ve replaced Google with ChatGPT for 80% of queries.”
- “Educational content is saturated, the future of B2B marketing is personality-led content.”
- “People have short attention spans, no one wants to listen to a long podcast.”
- “People are bored with interview-based podcasts, you have to do something creative and novel.”
All valid opinions to hold, in some sense. These types of insights often lead to great ideas, campaigns that stand out, and even business and product ideas.
For instance, it is generally true that getting to poke around in a product helps buyers decide between solutions, thus something like Navattic solves this.
As a matter of marketing effectiveness, however, I could thoroughly debunk each of these using data and counter-examples.
But that’s not the point of this essay.
The point of this essay is that you are not your audience, and that by limiting your set of options to what you believe, you limit the potential impact of your programs, campaigns, and experiments.
No one likes comic sans, right?
Andrew Anderson has influenced my thinking a ton (and sparked my interest in Nassim Taleb’s ideas, which I believe I’ve passed on to many of you).
He’s an experimentation guy, so much of what he speaks about applies to the lens of marketing and product management that can be analyzed somewhat objectively and run through randomized controlled trials.
A world where highly paid people’s opinions often clash with what the data objectively says.
One thing he hammers home is that our own cognitive biases often prevent us from achieving the results we want.
In the funniest and most extreme example of this, he wrote about an experiment involving the cartoonish villain of aesthetics: comic sans.
Since I edited and published the article on CXL, I’ll just give you the passage here:
“My team decided to run a font styling test on one of our larger sites. We included concepts from our designer, our copywriter and others, but of course we included challengers to those beliefs as well to make sure our pool was as high beta as possible. So guess what won? What is the one font that would upset a designer or copywriter the most?
If you said Comic Sans, you win no prize.
Not only did it prove to generate a 70%+ lift to RPV, but it blew away all the other tested experiences. We are talking well over 3 weeks of data as proof here. For us that means we are helping 70% more people get help, which is what we are here to do. For a designer however it means that they now are being asked to put a despised and hated font on a site that they “own.”
Now I am sure that you are already going through a thousand and one excuses, explanations, attacks on testing data, etc…but that is exactly my point.
From an optimization standpoint, Comic Sans could just as easily be called “Font Variant #5,” but because we all have a visceral hatred of Comic Sans and that does not mesh with our notions of aesthetic beauty, good design, or professional pages, we must come up with an explanation to our cognitive dissonance.
Is there anything inherently wrong with comic sans? No. But from a design perspective it challenges the vision of so many. Did testing make comic sans the better option? No. It just revealed that information to us and made us face that knowledge head-on.
If you are testing in the most efficient way possible, you are going to get these results all the time. These are the moments that teams will turn against your optimization program in a heartbeat.”
“The world has changed. Consumers no longer want [insert thing here]”
Comic sans is, like I said, a whimsical example.
But you hear similar (and more rational sounding) opinions all the time, usually backed up by some phrase about human behavior changing.
The first time I really recall this happening was when Drift came out with a (very effective) campaign proclaiming “forms are dead.”
If you’re too young to remember it (or you just live an interesting enough life that doesn’t center around B2B SaaS product marketing), it was around 2018-19, and the foundational gating mechanism on the internet was the form.
You enter information in form fields, validate that information with javascript, and collect the information in a CRM (and often automatically trigger an email to send an ebook or to book a meeting).
Drift claimed that this was old school. People hate forms. They want to have a conversation. They want conversational chatbots.
I was at HubSpot at the time, and I was working on freemium acquisition. One of our products was a free forms tool. We also, for what it’s worth, offered a conversational bot. But I was genuinely curious, “what is the perception of forms in the market?”
So we conducted research. At least at the time in 2019, the data showed that the claims that “forms are dead” were completely overblown. People were, by and large, fine with forms, and they performed quite well.
Let’s further complicate the plot: the point here is not that “the new thing” is always overblown. Often, “the new thing” is early and really does change the way consumers interact with products.
In this example, I actually really dislike using chatbots and prefer forms. But, and this is the important message – my audience may like chatbots. I’ve run many experiments that “prove” both can be right depending on the context.
I simply cannot universalize my own preferences, filtering out potentially more effective ways of reaching my intended audience and customers, and preventing the success of my product and company.
I hate jogging. Plenty of people love it. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people like Pearl Jam. But they do.
What I should really do is be open-minded and understand that other people have different preferences and thoughts than I do.
Theory of Mind, Piaget’s Egocentrism, and Good Old Fashioned Data
Jean Piaget came up with a popular model of cognitive development, outlining stages of development through childhood. His “preoperational stage” is the second one, occurring from roughly two years old to seven years old.
It is marked by “egocentrism,” which “refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the child does.”
At this stage, we simply haven’t developed “theory of mind,” which is “the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.”
I’m being a bit didactic in describing these theories, as I clearly don’t believe that all of us marketers are stuck in the preoperational stage of development.
We can obviously theorize that others feel differently than we do.
But the ideas here help remind me of something we all know we should do: get out of our own heads, and into the heads of our audience and customers.
Every single one of us falls into this thinking trap, including myself, and especially when it seems “obvious” to us what customers want.
I’m going to give you an example, and I want to emphasize that I’m not throwing Amanda under the bus. I respect her work a ton, read every newsletter she puts out, and she may even be reading this newsletter.
But Amanda Natividad’s newsletter literally just came out as I was writing it and it’s the PERFECT EXAMPLE, so I had to use it. Check it out:
Now, obviously, I run an SEO agency.
But I have such an insane abundance of data that shows this is not true, and in fact, I’m often surprised by how many people convert from “what is [keyword]” pages, especially in technical spaces and for enterprise software.
And I fall for this trap myself. All. The. Time.
In fact, just last night, I was talking to a friend about his idea for a marketing meetup that was much more involved than a little dinner or a happy hour. I started opining about how much friction it was and how I wouldn’t go through the effort to do something like that, and then I realized…I’m doing the thing!
I hadn’t interviewed a single person or looked at any data. I just assumed that, because it didn’t sound good to me, that others would feel the same way.
So what are we left with?
The banal cliches you’ve all heard before:
- Customer research
- Data analysis
- Experimentation
Actually, one interview question I’ve been loving lately is, “what marketing experiment you’ve run recently that surprised you?”
We should all have one of these. I have dozens. It’s not that I’m naive or bad at marketing; I’m simply not clairvoyant. Heck, I can’t even accurately describe my own “customer journey” or how I decide to buy products.
We’re not even good at understanding our own behavior and preferences
As Eric Doty pointed out on my LinkedIn post about the false consensus effect, we’re not even good at attributing our own behavior and attitudes.
This is certainly true of myself if I’m being reflective and intellectually honest.
I consider myself a highbrow content consumer. I like to, if I can, read research papers about the technology of a given bandit algorithm in an experimentation platform. I pride myself on being able to grok the really technical, long-form stuff.
But I just signed up for a product last week because I searched for a jobs-to-be-done phrase (something like “AI overview tracking tools”), read like two listicles, and I converted on a free trial.
My company just got back from an offsite in Costa Rica that originated from a cold email that was sent to me two years ago.
I entered my email to download a recent state of the industry report last week.
Yesterday, I wanted to figure out how to blow up a photo I took on a trip to Guatemala and make it into a canvas image. I searched for how to do that, landed on a blog post, and bought from the company that wrote it. Last click! Insane!
I’m a hypocrite. Most of us think advertising works, just not on us. But it does. I like to think that I’m a highbrow and discerning consumer, and I’m too smart for all the simple and old school marketing tricks. But I’m not, even though I’m aware of them.
We have trouble explaining our own behavior due to deeply embedded cognitive biases:
- Recall bias happens when we don’t accurately remember past events or behaviors. We tend to forget instances that contradict our current beliefs or feelings, which can lead to a skewed perception of how often something happens, like cold emails working on you.
- Self-reporting bias occurs when people inaccurately report their behaviors or preferences, often because they either don’t remember correctly or unconsciously want to present themselves in a certain way.
So even if you survey people and ask them how they prefer to do something, you may get inaccurate results. After all, there’s a delta between what people say and what people do.
Human behavior and psychology is complex, ain’t it?
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