The death of curiosity in marketing

I wonder if certainty has become one of the biggest enemies of curiosity in marketing.

We have never had this much information at our disposal, yet I’m not convinced it has made us proportionately better at understanding people. If anything, having an answer available for almost everything may have made us a little too comfortable with the answers we get.

A dashboard tells us conversions are up 18%. Good news, the campaign worked!

Except maybe the competition raised its prices, availability changed, sales did something differently, or the category simply had a good month. The 18% is still correct; what deserves more examination is why it happened.

Data is brilliant at fact-finding, but quite poor at judgement - which typically comes from experience, context, observation and knowing what else to question. It also comes from being willing to ask why three or four times, particularly when the first answer looks perfectly reasonable.

I think we’ve become less comfortable doing that.

Marketing has spent years becoming more measurable, attributable, optimised, and efficient, much of it for good reason. Performance marketing accelerated this because results could suddenly be observed and acted upon quickly. The danger is that the faster we can observe, report, and optimise something, the less incentive there is to spend time wondering whether we have understood it properly.

There is an organisational problem here too. Data rarely reaches a decision-maker untouched. An analyst interprets it, somebody then turns that into a report, another person extracts a conclusion, and eventually it lands in a management presentation. The underlying number may not have changed at all, while the qualification around what it means has likely disappeared along the way.

The thing is - curiosity doesn’t fit particularly neatly into this system. It takes you outside the brief. It makes you look at unrelated categories, speak to people who weren’t in the research plan, challenge perfectly good data, and sometimes spend hours investigating something that turns out to be useless. None of this looks terribly efficient on a timesheet or dashboard, but a lot of good marketing thinking has always happened this way.

Curiosity also needs a little space. Some of my better ideas arrive while driving, in the shower, on a hill with no signal, or simply when nothing is asking for my attention. We’ve increased the amount of information marketers process while steadily reducing the time available to sit with any of it. I doubt those two things are unrelated.

AI makes this especially interesting. I use it extensively and it has increased the breadth of what I can research enormously. But its value depends heavily on what I ask it to do.

I could have asked AI to write this post from the original thought and had something back in seconds. Instead, I used it to interrogate the thought first. We questioned the premise, argued about where data helps and where it doesn’t, looked for contradictions, checked whether the idea had already been debated, and changed parts of the argument as a result. By not asking it to write for me, I ended up using it to improve both my argument and my understanding of the subject.

That, to me, is a far more interesting use of AI in marketing. Not simply helping us arrive at answers more quickly, but giving us the ability to investigate those answers much further than we could before.

We already have extraordinary tools for telling us what happened. I think the better marketers will be the ones who remain slightly suspicious of how quickly they think they know why.