Abstract

Volume I of Critical Thinking for Marketers focuses on helping you make strong and cogent marketing arguments. These arguments provide the foundation for strategic and tactical recommendations you ultimately will make to senior management or the board of directors.

In contrast, Volume II expands your background knowledge of other areas of critical thinking that are making major contributions to both marketing as a social science (what professors do) and marketing as an applied science (what you as real-world marketers do). This background knowledge should give you a better appreciation for how knowledge is created in marketing. Having a basic understanding of selected concepts in the fields of behavioral economics and cognitive science are vital to improving the quality of marketing decisions and recommendations you make on a daily basis.

This volume is divided into three major sections: Think Better, Cognitive Biases and Their Importance, and Conclusions.

Section I, Think Better, provides introductory discussions of

• Marketing as a science.

• The difference between correlation and causation, plus a thinking tool (“The Five Whys?”) to help in discerning the difference.

• The meaning of what a “concept” is and why it is critical for marketers to develop good concept definitions (e.g., “What is customer satisfaction?”).

• Why what the Scottish philosopher David Hume said 170 years ago is relevant to marketers today.

• The impact that behavioral economics is having on how marketers do their job.

Section II, Cognitive Biases and Their Importance, talks about recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that have relevance to marketers. You’ll learn that marketers need to be aware of their own cognitive biases and irrational thinking processes, which often lead to making bad decisions, and that the retail and business customers we market to are not as rational as we may think and hope they are.

Finally, Section III, Conclusions, draws on both Volumes I and II to summarize the book’s primary messages with helpful hints on applying your new tools and making better marketing decisions.

Keywords

behavioral economics, causation, cognitive biases, cognitive science, concept, correlation, critical thinking, epistemology, logic, marketing, marketing laws, science