Ready for a reality hit? Your life is all about controlling your brain. If you can control it, your life will depend on your decisions. If you can’t control it, your life will depend on your environment.
Marketing is all about controlling another person’s brain. Marketers learn how the brain works and then use what they learn to influence the brain while making us think we made a decision. Seeing an advertisement, reading an article, listening to radio, or watching a video are all examples of environmental influence.
One way to change brains is by using evidence. People believe they are making rational choices if they are given data. They seldom question the data.
A great example is looking at poverty programs. Let’s say we can all agree that we don’t want anybody in the U.S. to be hungry. We agree that the federal government should have a program to feed people who are hungry. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. How will we know if the program was effective?
We should start by determining the scope of the problem. How many people do not have enough food? If we really want to solve the problem, we will go further and determine why they don’t have enough food. Right now, we aren’t going there. We just determine a number, and our goal is to provide food.
Next, a law is passed to provide food for people who need it. People are hired to determine qualifications. More people are hired to screen people to determine if they are eligible. More people are hired to buy food. More people are hired to distribute food. We find we have spent a lot of money to feed people. Many people will feel really good about our efforts to feed hungry people. After all, look at how much money we spent.
The numbers that are used to determine the effectiveness of the program is the number of dollars spent. We were spending nothing and now we’re spending $X. I’ll let you fill in the $X. Those are the wrong numbers. What if you learned that after spending $X, nobody was fed?
That is a fallacy of using the wrong numbers. Now imagine cutting the bureaucracy and just giving people money to go buy food. What if we fed a million people but decreased spending? The people who focus on dollars spent will claim that the program has been cut and now more people are starving. How many more? They don’t know. They never tracked the right numbers.
There can be other arguments too. Some will argue that the numbers are wrong. Spending wasn’t decreased. That might be an argument worth having; however, we are still arguing about the wrong numbers.
The method I described applies to a lot more than food assistance. The process applies to nearly everything.
I have written about my physique goals. I have a goal of my chest being 10 inches bigger than my waist. I am also monitoring my weight. When I lost weight down to 147 pounds, my chest was about 6 inches bigger than my waist. When I weighed 160, my chest was about 6 inches bigger than my waist. In fact, at one point in my life I weighed 180 and my chest was still about 6 inches bigger than my waist. That is normal. I want to be better than normal.
My point is that if I just looked in the mirror, I looked normal even though my weight could have varied by 33 pounds!! I wouldn’t have been tracking the right numbers.
Now my chest is about 9 inches bigger than my waist. I think I look better. I feel a little better. I’m lifting weights to improve my measurements. I’m tracking numbers that mean something to me.
In business, we have similar challenges. What numbers should we track? Forty years ago, a restaurant owner told me that it was easy to increase gross profit. He would just reduce the price of a sandwich by a dollar. He said it was much harder to increase net profit. Net profit is what you have left after paying expenses. If he only focused on gross profit, things could look great, and he could be losing money.
If you want to be in control of your brain, think about the data you are being given. Are you getting meaningful numbers? Don’t argue about the wrong numbers.