Absurdist Marketing

Caveat: Everything is a lie. To speak in absolutes about concepts is like trying to bite your own teeth with your teeth. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Who are your customers?

What makes them buy?

What makes them select your product over another? Or another product over yours?

Now, who are you?

Are you “18-35, living with disposable income, making over $35,000 a year, living in the suburbs, has a cat and 2.3 children”?

Are you the sum of everything that everyone thinks about you? Do you fit cleanly into a category every moment of the day? Are you simply the name, and the idea that your parents hoped for when you were born?

And if you are all those things, are you nothing else? Are you not a unique blend of atoms, more or less than the person or persons who share your bed? Are you not also the container of last night’s meal?

Where do you stop? And where do you begin? What’s important about you — what you are and what you desire that makes you buy?

And if you know everything about everyone that has bought your product in the past, do you therefore know everything about everyone who will buy your product in the future?

Decisions have to be made. Which information is important? And because it was relevant to someone else, is it relevant to you? Are you being completely scientific, examining cause and effect, or are you drawing conclusions based on incomplete information and hoping those conclusions are correct?

So often, we might dismiss auguring and fortune-telling and casting yarrow stalks as superstitious, but at the end of the day, how often do we ultimately “Go with our gut”?

If professionals in a field of such high stakes as investment advisors tend to have a year-to-year correlation in performance of .01 (according to Kahneman) — effectively no better than a coin flip — despite their mountains of data and massive resources at their disposal, what makes us so reliant on marketing firms?

Perhaps, at some core place deep inside, we might admit to ourselves that we don’t know our self. So making a decision, we distrust our own intuition. And distrusting our own intuition, we look to others to make the decision for us.

You might see then how absurd this is: we are, because we don’t know our self, asking another who surely equally does not know their self, to tell us who people who do not know their selves really are.