COMPLACENT MARKETING
Marketing For Profit
By Diana Obath
C
ontent marketing has had
marketing professionals locked
in discussions for hours on
end over the past two years. A
number of conclusions have been drawn
and widely published, and implemented.
Content marketing has shown us all why
content is king. But is content really
seated on the throne already?
A lot of the times, we look at marketing
from the perspective of what we already
know, informed by research, to prove that
what we actually know is what we thought
we knew. Mark Twain however, in one of
his writings said, ‘It ain’t what you don’t
know that gets you into trouble. It’s what
you know for sure that just ain’t so.’
This could be the reality in how we handle
our ‘king’ in marketing. Marketing in
most companies gets the lion’s share of
the budget and of course at the end of
the month, quarter or year the business
expects ROI equal to or above the amount
that was allocated to marketing in itself.
A number of multinationals have
completely changed how they define
marketing budgets and how they approach
return on investment towards marketing
activities. They are now using the approach
of turning marketing cost into profit for
the business, but not in your traditional
way. They are monetizing audiences, and
this is the future of marketing.
Psychologists Danny Kahneman and
Amos Tversky wrote a research paper in
1970 about the ‘Belief in the law of small
numbers.’ The findings revealed that even
professional academics mistook a small
part for the whole when making decisions.
One example they give is that if you were
asked to flip a coin 100 times and that the
first two times it flipped to tails, you would
believe that the majority of flips would be
tails even when the probability is not true.
That is the gamblers fallacy – as human
beings, the more we see something, the
A number of multinationals have completely
changed how they define marketing budgets and
how they approach return on investment towards
marketing activities. They are now using the ap-
proach of turning marketing cost into profit for
the business, but not in your traditional way. They
are monetizing audiences, and this is the future
of marketing.
08 MAL21/17 ISSUE
more this becomes our reality, regardless
of whether the sample size is too small to
draw any realistic conclusions.
In the same manner, if a check was run
in hospitals to question increasing cases
of doctors’ mis-diagnosis today, doctors
would not like it because they consider
themselves experienced professionals in
their field. If someone had to check each
diagnosis and question the doctor about
their decisions, the obvious reaction from
the doctor would be that they would feel
offended because they have interacted
with similar cases over and over again.
Realistically speaking then, the increased
mis-diagnosis is a result of over confidence
in the doctors core experience while often
times ignoring other signals that are not
familiar at first sight. This is Mark Twain’s
concept of getting into trouble because of
what you do not know.
Assuming you went to an auction today
and saw a number of abstract paintings
that you were not familiar with all hang
up on a wall. If the auctioneer walked
up to you and said the pa inting you were
admiring belonged to a high schooler
and the one you didn’t like very much
belonged to Pablo Picasso, you would
immediately have a change of mind about
the painting you chose because of what
you know about the painter. Maybe you
would no longer view it as a piece of art
and start viewing it as a priced possession.