The gifted science writer Stephen Jay Gould once wrote a wonderful essay on
how our memories deceive us.
For years, Gould remembered the sunny
afternoons of his youth, talking with his dad on the steps leading into the Forest
Hills Tennis Center.
Several years ago, Gould was walking in his old
neighborhood. Suddenly he saw those steps.
They led up to the dilapidated door of Mueller Moving and Storage.
We remember badly. We look back and see things that were not there. We
cite as proof for something an event that simply did not occur as we remember it.
In planning, Beware of what you think you remember.
The Fallacy of Experience
They say people learn from experience. Some do.
But consider what one Minnesota company
thought it learned from its
advertising. In 1988 the company used some fairly obscure Minnesota celebrities
as spokespersons in some unremarkable national television ads. The ads flopped.
The marketing director, of course, confidently concluded
that using celebrities in
ads doesn’t work.
The people at Nike should speak with her.
In the early 1980s, a Minnesota dairy ran an internationally acclaimed radio
campaign featuring the dairy’s foreman. One spring morning, a dairy executive
received an angry letter. The elderly woman author
was upset over a commercial
in which Ord Paulsen, the foreman, said that the dairy’s prize cow reminded him
of his wife. Meeting with
two agency people afterward, the executive read the
letter, hurled it into his desk, and insisted that the agency kill the campaign. The
letter confirmed, in the executive’s
exact words, that “these spots use humor.
And people do not like humor.”
When we infer things, we tend to overgeneralize. We want to establish
cubbyholes and some general principles. And so we decide that celebrities never
work in ads, that people do not like humor—and
a dozen other examples of
concluding too much from too little.
What does what you experience really prove? Usually, far less than you
thought. And what you thought you learned can make you abandon a strategy or
tactic that was 90 percent right.
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