Sometimes marketers who track sales learn things that contradict what you hear from marketers who don’t.

When that happens, the latter humbly admit their errors.

Ha ha. I bet you’re rolling on the floor about now. Seriously, folks, what they’re more likely to do is fight fire with snark. For instance, when we say that hard-hitting, late-night, 60-second commercials outsell entertaining, Prime-Time, 30-second commercials, never mind that we’re right. They can summarily dispatch us with, “You want Apple to sell Macs like they’re ShamWows?”

It’s easier to mock what it takes background to understand, than to do homework and arrive at an informed conclusion.

There is danger in this. Had today’s so-called news commentators lived in medieval times, imagine the fun they’d have had making the Germ Theory of Disease sound ridiculous: “Get this folks. The ‘experts’ are telling us that small, invisible animals are living inside you! There are supposedly more of these little critters in a drop of your spit than there are people living on the earth. These ‘experts’ need to get a grip.”

Actually, that’s a fair representation of how leaders, and their equally uninformed publics, reacted to Germ Theory. As a result, medical providers resisted practices such as washing hands and sterilizing implements, unwittingly and needlessly continuing to spread infections for decades.

Think we’ve changed? The nation should have, but didn’t, burst into unanimous, uproarious laughter when Don McLeroy, chair of the Texas State Board of Education, testified, “Someone has to stand up to the experts.” In fact, more than a few heads nodded in agreement. But then, what choice did they have? It was either that or weigh the evidence, thereby risking intellectual growth.

No person or group, even of experts, is infallible. And marketing isn’t as consequential as medicine. But in either domain, it’s safer and wiser to bet on a consensus of experts than on a consensus of blowhards. No matter how loud or witty said blowhards get.

(Oh, and germs are real. Despite what your chiropractor might tell you.)

Steve Cuno
 


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