For all the talk about customer-centricity, there's a dirty little secret that no marketer will easily admit to. Marketing as a discipline, and the core of most traditional business school marketing curricula, is inward-looking. Take the much-vaunted 4Ps: build the right product, price it correctly, put it in the right place, and promote it to induce purchase. It's all about the brand and not about the consumer. The consumer responds predictably, robot-like, to the various strategies cooked up by marketers.
Meet homo economicus - the rational consumer. The foundation of modern marketing. Shhhh! Don't tell anyone. She doesn't really exist.
It's taken a while for the marketing community to even talk about this. When I was at the University of Chicago, I sat in Richard Thaler's PhD class on behavioral economics, which was, even in late 1990s, well ahead of its time and disconnected from the MBA curriculum of the above mentioned 4P flavor. In 2011, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman offered for mass consumption two very different thought systems in "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Thaler recently reviewed the Michael Lewis (of Liar's Poker and The Big Short fame) book on the collaboration between Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Here's the basic idea: there are two systems that drive our decision making. One is highly analytical, and was presumed to be the epicenter of our rational being.
The second is a much quicker, effortless, and instinctual process. This latter system, known as System 1, is what drives the majority of our decisions. System 2, our rational processing system, takes a back seat. Our evolutionary development instructs our brains to be parsimonious, favoring more energy efficient processes. It may sound counter-intuitive, but our rational mind doesn't drive decisions. Our emotional mind (and I take some scientific liberty in that usage) does.
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