Page 47 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

actually called his department the Insurance Department. Product managers
would ask him for scientific support for their plans so they could go face top
management after their product bombed and say, “Well, hey, the Research said it
would work.”

Many people still give special weight to any statement that is highly
quantified, as if they believe that numbers have scientific weight. “Most people
prefer New Coke to Old Coke” sounds suspect to them. “Five out of six people”
sounds much better. But “83.3 percent of respondents” sounds like convincing
scientific data. Never mind that the last two statements—“Five out of six” and
“83.3 percent”—actually are identical. And never mind that all three statements
turned out to be totally inaccurate and misleading, as executives at Coca-Cola
learned to their public embarrassment.

This aura of science has a remarkable ability to fool people. Consider
Stanford Research Institute’s introduction of the VALs (Values, Attitudes, and
Lifestyles) concept to marketing planning in the mid-1980s. VALs concluded
that there are seven types of people, a conclusion that many people initially
bought. Did those people forget who they were?

Like everyone else, these people had met thousands of people and from that,
learned that each person is unique. These people had searched for friendships
and found very few people with whom they shared even a few things in
common. But when the VALs people came along—well-educated people linked
to a great university—and said, “There are seven types of people,” many bought
it.

Before long, commercials were touting coffee as the drink for “the New
Achievers” (the largest-VALs segment during that Yuppie era)—the comic
highlight of the mercifully brief VALs boom.

Today, even “hard” scientists confess that their sciences look softer every day.
And the “soft” sciences have little claim to science at all, even when they offer
broad generalizations backed by numbers.

My friend John Tillman, a brilliant student of the hard sciences, once
explained why he never studied one prominent social science. “Sociology,” John
insisted, “consists of systematic and fancy ways of describing what already is
obvious.”

Mistrust “facts.”And don’t approach planning as a precise science.
Planning is an imprecise art.

The Fallacy of Focus Groups