The idea that “the best products don’t need marketing” is based on a demonstrably false assertion.
This assertion is commonly referred to as rational choice theory:
“The rational agent is assumed to take account of available information, probabilities of events, and potential costs and benefits in determining preferences, and to act consistently in choosing the self-determined best choice of action,” says Investopedia.
It sounds nice, but it’s not true.
While people certainly believe that they take in all the inputs and analyze the full breadth of options, the reality is much different.
Work from the psychologists Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin have shown that we massively overestimate our ability to give things attention unless that attention is specifically directed.
In a 2000 study, Levin and Simons had an experimenter read participants a description of changes in four different short film scenes. These changes ranged from one actor alternating between wearing and not wearing a scarf to a complete change in actors.
The experimenter then showed participants both the pre-change and post-change views and pointed out the changes.
Next the participants stated whether they believed that they would have noticed the change, as well as their confidence in their response.
Nearly 83 percent of participants insisted with reasonable confidence that they would be able to detect the changes. However, only 11 percent of people from a different control group were actually able to detect the changes as they played out in real-time on screen.
Simons suggests that the reason for the discrepancy between the theoretical viewers and the actual scene viewers is that the scene viewers, the people who watched the change without direction from the experimenter, were unaware of where to focus their attention.
👀 89% of people missed the change until the experimenter directed their attention to it.
"Distinctive things, things that are unusual, things that are highly salient, don't necessarily draw attention to themselves if you're engaged in some other task," said Simons.
Your customers have a lot going on. They’re focused on their job, family, friends, and commitments. Most of them don’t have the space in their brain to see your product and properly value it’s utility for them.
The mistake that is made by “the best products don’t need marketing” crowd is the illusion of attention.
We believe that change draws our attention and that it will draw everyone else’s attention too, but we fail to realize just how much we miss because it is categorized by our mind as trivial.
When changes are pointed out to us and contextualized, we are able to properly orient them in relation to ourselves and our goals - we are able to PAY attention to them.
Your product cannot speak for itself - no one is listening. The only way a great product becomes successful is through you actively putting it in the best possible context for your customer. In other words - effective marketing it.
Our customers are blind to change unless we tell them where to look - unless we give them context by way of a new category that effectively communicates “pay attention to this, it’s valuable for YOU.”
Start designing your category. Tell stories that matter.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
PS - See the video below for an example of Daniel Simons’ work on change blindness.