B.F. Skinner did an experiment where he kept some hungry pigeons in a box to study conditioning and reinforcement. Here’s what he found and what you can learn to avoid stupid marketing and business mistakes.
At first, he decided to give them food at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior. The bird tends to learn whatever response it is making when the food hopper appears. The birds continued to do the behavior they were doing just before the food appeared as if they learned that doing so and so would give me food.
But one day, he decided to randomly give food to the hungry pigeons to see if they got conditioned. He dropped food at random times independent of the behavior of the birds but surprisingly the bird’s behavior got influenced again. 75% of the birds exhibited some odd behavior.
Whatever they were doing right before the food was presented to them, they thought was the cause of food appearing. So, if a pigeon was flapping its wings before the food appeared, it developed a superstition that the food appeared because of flapping its wings.
If a pigeon was circling counterclockwise, it continued to do so thinking the food appeared because of its circling motion. If a pigeon was making some noise when the food appeared, it thought that the noise caused the food to appear.
Pigeons concluded a causal relationship between their actions and the reward when there was none and it was in fact random. This is similar to superstition in gambling where a gambler thinks that wearing a certain hat or having a certain color card will increase his luck and chances of winning. It shows that pigeons just like us are superstitious and both species have the same compulsion to find patterns where there are none.
Marketing and Business Superstition:
In business too, there’s a natural instinct to find patterns where there are none. Marketers, salespeople, and businessmen can become superstitious about what’s working and what’s a random good accident. Sometimes superstitions are a good thing because due to the Halo effect (Placebo effect), they make you confident, optimistic, and positively aroused and turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But basing medium to long-term business and marketing decisions on luck can be a costly exercise.
There are people who promise virality, but often with viral content, there’s no pattern. The photo of an egg can become the most-liked photo in the world and the experts will have to give some insights on it even though nobody really knows what’s happening. The job of an expert is to give advice whether they fully understand it or not, that's what runs their business.
When sending emails, running ads, and making reels or videos, try to find a causal relationship or correlation between action and result. Don’t assume that one thing causes something to happen. Try to understand the cause-and-effect relationship or at least the correlation of action and result.
Beyond this, understand that random events and luck always play a big factor. Regression to the mean- which states that in any event where luck is involved extreme good or bad problems will be followed by mediocre ones. For example, if you go out and have a poor performance in your sales job, most probably the next day you’re going to perform better than before. If you perform really incredibly one day, the chances are you will perform a little worse the next.
Often we become superstitious in business and marketing. If we use a certain marketing channel (let’s say YouTube) and we get good results, we might start to think that this is the gold mind we have been waiting for. But another factor comes into play here:
The Law of Marginal Diminishing Utility:
In economics, the law of diminishing marginal utility states that the marginal utility of a good or service declines as more of it is consumed by an individual. Economic actors receive less and less satisfaction from consuming incremental amounts of a commodity or service.
This implies when you use a new marketing channel, you’ll get the best benefit initially upfront, as you keep using it, the fruits of your efforts will keep diminishing even if the hard work remains the same or even increases.
This is like beginner gains when you first start weight lifting. In your first 1–2 years, you’ll see huge progress in your muscle and strength gains. But after 2–3 years, you’ll have to put relatively higher efforts to gain much lower benefits. It’s easy to make a car go from 100 kph to 300 kph, but it’s incredibly hard to make a similar jump from 300 kph to 600 kph.
Further Inquiry into absurdity:
- It’s easy to find patterns in business, sales, marketing, and personal growth even when there are no clear patterns. It’s the nature of chaotically complex systems to sometimes yield a miraculous result. Your mind is naturally biased and oversensitive to pattern recognition, so being aware and having the bandwidth to identify this bias will generate big wins. Don’t conclude a superstitious relationship of cause and effect.
- Always take a couple of neutral third-party perspectives- hopefully, someone who has nothing to gain from the answer but is smart enough to identify right from wrong.
- Always experiment- Before doubling down on your marketing technique, advertising channels, and theories, always try to falsify them. Give a task to your colleagues, especially those who are neutral, to find evidence against it. Ask them to prove your theories wrong. Let them play the devil's advocate.
- Think from first principles: Why would a pigeon flapping wings would result in instant food? Why would wearing a black hat increase your chances of winning the lottery? Why would one marketing channel work better for you than another? If your marketing is tight, all channels should work.
- Work to improve the daily average output, don’t focus on the highs and the lows because they might be caused by luck or chance.
When something doesn’t make sense even after critical thinking then leave it. Drop that plan. Even if that plan is right, if you can’t understand it, you can’t make it work effectively for you. You’ll end up working for it.
Learn to differentiate between tactics and principles. Carousel posts work better for organic reach in general but there is a reason for it. If you get too attached to posting carousel posts and don’t understand why it works, then you’re simply chasing a tactic. You don’t really understand social media at its core.
There’s also another factor that comes into play:
The tragedy of commons:
The tragedy of the commons is an economic problem where the individual consumes a resource at the expense of society. If an individual acts in their best interest, it can result in harmful over-consumption to the detriment of all. This phenomenon may result in under-investment and total depletion of a shared resource.
Simply speaking, let’s say making short videos is the brand-new hype in marketing. Someone made a short video for YouTube or Instagram and got amazing results. He did it again and again and enjoyed the results. But other people started noticing. Now, everyone wants more engagement, followers, and fame so they all started copying. When other people start copying and making short videos, the effectiveness of short videos as a whole will go down. When everyone is making short videos, it will be not effective at all. It won’t give you the competitive edge or extraordinary results. Only average, what everyone else is getting.
The same thing happened with email marketing, SEO, Social Media, etc. In marketing, if everyone is doing something, it probably has outdone its days. Do it but don’t expect the same remarkable results as you once got. The magic fades away.
If you understand the fundamentals behind marketing and the first principles, then you can make your own strategy.
This is what I help businesses do at RAMSY- Rational Marketing Services.
Get in touch to explore further.
