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Adel Borky
@adelborky
Quietly Building Marketing’s Epistemological Sovereignty | Self-Made Marketing Man (Autodidact) | Fluent in Human Absurdity (Behavioral Science Aficionado) | Once Punched People in the Face for Fun (Ex-Boxer)
Posts
Adel Borky
Sales & Marketing
3mo
This post will annoy two groups of people; those who believe marketing works like medicine, and those who profit from pretending it does.
Please STOP comparing marketing to medicine!
Yes, both are applied disciplines, Yes, both deal with complex interdependent systems.
But medicine has been studied seriously for more than two millennia! while marketing has only been treated as a discipline for about a century (and even that is generous!)
MORE importantly, marketing is a fat-tailed domain (shout-out to Rory Sutherland for bringing this insight to marketing) Its outcomes are not evenly distributed, a small number of ideas, campaigns, products, etc, generate a disproportionate share of the total impact; small actions can produce outsized results, while large investments can vanish into near-silence.
Therefore, marketing is probabilistic, not deterministic, it is governed not by linear causality, but by probabilistic exposure to rare, high-impact opportunities, and treating it deterministically amputates the upside along with the noise!
And this happens because markets are nonlinear and path-dependent systems (social contagion, network effects, cultural feedback loops) amplify small differences into massive divergences.
An environment where averages are poor guides, and prediction becomes inherently unstable.
That ALONE should make us cautious about pretending we possess the same kind of stable, cumulative knowledge base that fields like medicine (or even engineering) enjoy.
Those disciplines operate largely in more bounded environments, where variation is less extreme and knowledge accumulates more predictably (even if not perfectly)
And YET, marketing has been squeezed from two sides for years.
On one side, "the bookkeepers", those who believe repeating STP and the 4Ps (and other products of neoclassical economic thinking) constitutes the full intellectual architecture of marketing.
On the other "the technoplasmosis-infected" who believe dashboards, attribution models (and the alarming number of acronyms) have somehow turned marketing into a hard science.
Both groups share the same comforting illusion; that the discipline is far more settled than it actually is!
In reality, we're (humans) only just beginning to understand how real humans behave in markets.
So perhaps a little intellectual humility is in order.
It’s barely the beginning!
113
Adel Borky
Sales & Marketing
3mo
This post will annoy two groups of people; those who believe marketing works like medicine, and those who profit from pretending it does.
Please STOP comparing marketing to medicine!
Yes, both are applied disciplines, Yes, both deal with complex interdependent systems.
But medicine has been studied seriously for more than two millennia! while marketing has only been treated as a discipline for about a century (and even that is generous!)
MORE importantly, marketing is a fat-tailed domain (shout-out to Rory Sutherland for bringing this insight to marketing) Its outcomes are not evenly distributed, a small number of ideas, campaigns, products, etc, generate a disproportionate share of the total impact; small actions can produce outsized results, while large investments can vanish into near-silence.
Therefore, marketing is probabilistic, not deterministic, it is governed not by linear causality, but by probabilistic exposure to rare, high-impact opportunities, and treating it deterministically amputates the upside along with the noise!
And this happens because markets are nonlinear and path-dependent systems (social contagion, network effects, cultural feedback loops) amplify small differences into massive divergences.
An environment where averages are poor guides, and prediction becomes inherently unstable.
That ALONE should make us cautious about pretending we possess the same kind of stable, cumulative knowledge base that fields like medicine (or even engineering) enjoy.
Those disciplines operate largely in more bounded environments, where variation is less extreme and knowledge accumulates more predictably (even if not perfectly)
And YET, marketing has been squeezed from two sides for years.
On one side, "the bookkeepers", those who believe repeating STP and the 4Ps (and other products of neoclassical economic thinking) constitutes the full intellectual architecture of marketing.
On the other "the technoplasmosis-infected" who believe dashboards, attribution models (and the alarming number of acronyms) have somehow turned marketing into a hard science.
Both groups share the same comforting illusion; that the discipline is far more settled than it actually is!
In reality, we're (humans) only just beginning to understand how real humans behave in markets.
So perhaps a little intellectual humility is in order.
It’s barely the beginning!
113
Adel Borky
Sales & Marketing
3mo
This post will annoy two groups of people; those who believe marketing works like medicine, and those who profit from pretending it does.
Please STOP comparing marketing to medicine!
Yes, both are applied disciplines, Yes, both deal with complex interdependent systems.
But medicine has been studied seriously for more than two millennia! while marketing has only been treated as a discipline for about a century (and even that is generous!)
MORE importantly, marketing is a fat-tailed domain (shout-out to Rory Sutherland for bringing this insight to marketing) Its outcomes are not evenly distributed, a small number of ideas, campaigns, products, etc, generate a disproportionate share of the total impact; small actions can produce outsized results, while large investments can vanish into near-silence.
Therefore, marketing is probabilistic, not deterministic, it is governed not by linear causality, but by probabilistic exposure to rare, high-impact opportunities, and treating it deterministically amputates the upside along with the noise!
And this happens because markets are nonlinear and path-dependent systems (social contagion, network effects, cultural feedback loops) amplify small differences into massive divergences.
An environment where averages are poor guides, and prediction becomes inherently unstable.
That ALONE should make us cautious about pretending we possess the same kind of stable, cumulative knowledge base that fields like medicine (or even engineering) enjoy.
Those disciplines operate largely in more bounded environments, where variation is less extreme and knowledge accumulates more predictably (even if not perfectly)
And YET, marketing has been squeezed from two sides for years.
On one side, "the bookkeepers", those who believe repeating STP and the 4Ps (and other products of neoclassical economic thinking) constitutes the full intellectual architecture of marketing.
On the other "the technoplasmosis-infected" who believe dashboards, attribution models (and the alarming number of acronyms) have somehow turned marketing into a hard science.
Both groups share the same comforting illusion; that the discipline is far more settled than it actually is!
In reality, we're (humans) only just beginning to understand how real humans behave in markets.
So perhaps a little intellectual humility is in order.
It’s barely the beginning!
113