Can critical thinking play a role in marketing today?

March 27, 2012 at 18:33 · Filed under Marketing innovation, marketing strategy and tagged: critical thinking, logic, Marketing, marketing innovation, marketing strategy, rational thinking, social media

Dear Reader,

I believe the answer is “yes”; critical thinking can play an important tole in marketing today whether in strategy or execution.  Critical thinking in marketing can be like the old fable of the tortoise and the hare.

Social media is one of the biggest disruptions of traditional communication paradigms and human behavioral norms.  The entire race course has changed in obvious ways and not so obvious ways.  The known world of GRPs, reach and frequency, direct marketing response rates and lead generation scoring are in flux as everyone contemplates the new race before them.  Critical thinking in marketing offers every professional a laboratory of unprecedented leaning and expansion of knowledge to dramatically increase the likelihood of successful marketing innovation.  Why push to “fast-fail forward”, when you can win the race with a modicum of rational thinking –saving yourself, your team, and your company much time, effort, resources, pain, blood, sweat, and tears.

Critical thinking has been described as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”  It is a methodology to map a new course of effective marketing strategy and practice.  As you practice critical thinking, it is important to prepare yourself for the journey.

• Be open-minded, letting go of your inhibitions and stereotypes.  These are baggage that might prevent you from finding the answers you are looking for.  You need to be rational, reasonable.
• Be humble and recognize the flawed nature of human thinking including your own and strive to reduce any biases while constantly seeking an improvement in the quality of understanding.
• Avoid being simplistic about complicated issues and strive to achieve a reasonable balance between the two.  The devil can be in the details and heaven lost in generalizations.
• Be honest, socially conscious, and well-mannered– aware of your place or position and empathetic of the position of others.
• Be inquisitive–unaccepting of the status quo and generally accepted preconceptions.

There are many tools for the practice of critical thinking in marketing.  The only limitations are your imagination.  Many of the tools that I will present here will be familiar.  Some of them may seem to overlap but nuances in the approach may reveal insights that would otherwise have been foregone.  These tools should be used in combination in order to test and validate a conclusion or considered course of action.

• Another person’s shoes– Step outside of your own frame of perspective to examine the situation from multiple other perspectives.  This is particular important in marketing as you eschew the perspective your customer or prospect and anticipate their reaction to your blog posting, tweet or any other social interaction.
• Pros & cons– Methodically list the pros and cons of any situation or course of action in order to develop a solid understanding of the consequences.  Don’t presume that everything is obvious; there are consequences to every action and they should be weighed carefully.
• Objectivism—What would someone completely unrelated to the matter you are considering think about the proposed action?  Your posting may seems innocuous to your own perspective but to someone else they may perceive some insult.
• Subjectivism – Similar to walking in another person shoes but conducted for the purposes of examining the impact of extreme perspectives.  What would someone to the far left and right of your spectrum think of the activity?  Is there a way to satisfy both perspectives?  If not which will be the most important to achieving what you want and how can you mitigate the other from obfuscating your objective?
• Empirical examination- Related to objectivism but with today’s social media we now have more data ever for analysis and interpretation that can uncover insight, presuppositions, and hypothesis on which to build further understanding and decision-making.
• Deductive reasoning- If one thing is true then the next thing should also be true leading to a conclusion based on the natural flow of premises.  If my competitor wrote something about a mutual customer, why did they do this?  What is the likely immediate and mid-term outcome of this action?
• Devil’s advocate–A methodology of deliberately poking holes in a plan of action for the purposes of eliminating and/or validating underlying premises and beliefs central to that endeavor.  Sometimes it is helpful to beat the living day lights out of a proposed course of action in order to reveal any hidden weaknesses that could prove a liability later on.
• Worse case/best case scenario analysis—Allows you consider the potential range of implications of any given activity under extreme perspectives or dimensions.  Similar to subjectivism.
• Deconstruction– A deliberate disassembly of a hypothesis or plan into components for individual examination and validation to eliminate flawed portions of a plan and strengthen the final outcome.
• Extrapolation– If we except point “a” as true then as we look forward from this point based on known circumstances to point “b” somewhere in the future what  would this look like?  What precautions or risk can be mitigated by anticipating the future outcome?  This is a way to explore the future consequences of any given course of action and contingency plan.
• Reverse logic- If we know where we want to arrive, then we can work backwards from there to identify what are the necessary steps to reach that destination.

Many of your competitors and peers will rush to blindly invest in plans and strategies expecting to learn as they go along.  And they will get there eventually after many trials.  However, the critical thinker will get there with fewer trials.  And the more you practice it, the better and quicker you become at achieving success in marketing innovation.  The hare won’t even see you as you blow by him.

Kind regards,

Kevin Cox

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