Chapter 1

Introduction

“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

—H.L. Mencken

“…intelligence…is in plentiful supply…the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.”

—Carl Sagan

Solving marketing problems the traditional way is not working well. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted every year. Major business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune regularly chronicle and try to explain business failures due to flawed marketing thinking and business decisions. The topic keeps authors busy. I recently searched “marketing success” on the Amazon books web site and obtained nearly 28,900 results. Under “business success,” the list approached 61,000. With so much written on the subject, why do businesses continue to make dumb marketing mistakes? There must be a better way.

Instead of having “flavor-of-the-month marketing problem solvers” guiding our thinking, we can start by reasoning more rigorously about our problems in the first place, like a scientist solving a research problem or a mathematician solving a puzzling mathematical conjecture. We must begin to apply principles of scientific reasoning to solving marketing problems, but we first need to learn how.

Why I Wrote This Book

This is not just another book about critical thinking. Based on an extensive literature search, I have found nothing that delves deeply into the fields of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and philosophy of science (what it means to be called a science) and relates them to marketing. In addition, popular critical thinking resources do not incorporate the lessons we can learn from both epistemology and philosophy of science to help us think more effectively—or, as I characterize in this book, to reason more scientifically.

Popular business books eschew these concepts as too academic, theoretical, and, in all honesty, difficult to understand. This may be true, but business people are missing out on what has made the scientific way of viewing the world the most successful approach civilization has developed to create and apply knowledge.

This book translates selected topics from epistemology and philosophy of science into the language of business. It helps marketers develop a scientific way of thinking about and solving marketing problems and challenges. The book teaches you how to think. Not what to think.¹

It’s Not Academic

Before we travel together on this journey, I want to set straight any notion you might have that this book may be too “academic.” On the contrary, there is nothing more practical than solving a real marketing or business problem.

Some of the terms I will be discussing—such as belief, truth, knowledge, and theory—may conjure up images of that philosophy class you had in college or some Ivory-Tower professors who publish academic articles with little practical significance to the day-to-day tasks of running the marketing side of a business. I am confident, as you progress through this book, that you will come to consider these terms essential tools for improving your critical thinking skills and for applying scientific reasoning to the field of marketing.

From time to time, I will remind you of this book’s lessons and how to apply them to your job in a Thinking Tip, such as the one below.

Critical Thinking versus Scientific Reasoning

These two terms overlap, but are not identical. As defined by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, critical thinking “is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”²

Scientific reasoning is all that, and more. It additionally focuses on specific scientific methods and tools—discussed at length in this book—related to developing scientific knowledge that can help you understand, explain, and predict marketing phenomenon. Why is that important? Because, to motivate consumers to purchase your brands, you need to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that can explain and predict brand choice. For example, I will introduce you to concepts such as inductive and deductive logic, arguments, premises, explanation, experiments, and theory. This book translates scientific reasoning concepts and principles into your language and guides you in using them to solve business problems.

In some respects, a marketer is not much different from a scientist. Consider the following discussion of what scientists do:

[A scientist]…endeavors to describe, to order, to record (measure) [phenomena], to understand and to explain them; in these activities he is motivated particularly by a desire to be able to predict new phenomena, so that their predictability shall enable him to control his sector by influencing the phenomena.³

Substitute “marketer” for “scientist” and “marketing phenomena” for “phenomena,” and you pretty much mirror a central goal of marketers—to describe (Who are our competitors?), order (What are our competitors’ market shares?), record (What are our territory sales?), explain (What factors drive brand choice?), predict (If we launch a new advertising campaign, what impact will it have on our market share?), and control markets (How do we make our new product a success?). Marketing is not called a social science for nothing!

This is not a Marketing Research Textbook

Applying Scientific Reasoning to the Field of Marketing is written primarily for marketers, although marketing researchers can learn from it as well. (I use portions of this book in university marketing research classes that I teach.) Clearly, to move “beliefs” toward “knowledge,” some kind of marketing research is necessary. I am a realist, however, and recognize that many organizations do not have marketing research departments, and even if you are fortunate enough to have one in your organization, limited resources often prohibit us from doing all the research that we may feel is necessary. Consequently, I wrote this book so that it offers value to all marketers, regardless of whether they have the resources to do marketing research or not.

Importance of Definitions

Translating scientific and critical reasoning concepts and principles into the language of business necessarily requires me to define various terms from these fields, especially some rather controversial ones such as truth and knowledge. In this regard, I recently listened to a philosophy lecture by Dr. James Hall, the Thomas Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Richmond, VA. In effect, he said that if you were in a room filled with philosophy professors and offered definitions on concepts such as truth or knowledge, no matter how you defined them, at least three philosophers would pop out of their chairs and yell, “You’re wrong!”⁴ But we need to begin somewhere, and there is nothing wrong with starting with preliminary working definitions of these and a few other basic terms I discuss in Chapter 2. As you progress through this book, I will refine some of them—especially the definition of knowledge—and you will gain a better appreciation and understanding of these concepts’ nuanced meanings, thus making you a better critical thinker.

Real Examples

Along our journey, I also describe several personal accounts of consulting engagements I have had over my 35 years as a marketing researcher and consultant, as well as cases gleaned from the public record. None of the information I disclose about a particular company is confidential and can easily be found on the Internet. The Internet has made most business blunders public nowadays. My motivation in interspersing a few real-world case stories in the book is twofold: to illustrate how nonscientific thinking has driven many organizations over the cliff and to show which scientific reasoning concepts were either used or not used successfully.

The Ultimate Cause of Failed Thinking

You and I both know that a company’s demise is not because of any single factor—or could it be? For example, Mark Evens, a former executive at the now-failed Borders book stores, posted an informative essay on the Internet, giving six reasons for the retail giant’s bankruptcy: (1) failure to effectively address the Internet book market; (2) destructive retail store leasing strategy; (3) overinvestment in their music department; (4) blurred marketing focus with its intractably large assortment of book titles; (5) inefficient internal systems and processes; and, (6) inability to build the Borders’ brand in consumers’ minds.⁵ There is likely a seventh factor that Evens did not mention, perhaps because it is a given in the business world—corporate politics. Although organizational politics permeates most business decisions, and most of us have experienced it firsthand, I  do not address this most corrosive element that can render impotent the application of scientific reasoning to solving business problems.

So, was there a single, underlying, more fundamental factor that was most responsible in propelling Borders to its demise? Were all of Evens’ six reasons merely reflective indicators of this more fundamental factor? Indeed, I contend, there was.

Borders’ business decisions were driven by unjustified beliefs.

What this means, how it comes to pass, and how to apply scientific reasoning to the field of marketing to justify the beliefs on which you make your marketing recommendations begin on the following pages.