Actually, it turns out quite a few people do. An October 8 analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that 51% of respondents had written a personal check in the previous year. A third had written one in the previous month.
Check use is declining, no doubt. But that’s still a whole lot of people doing something we might casually declare nobody does.
And in advertising, that should give us pause. How often does “nobody does that” really mean “nobody I spend time with does that?” Or, more honestly, “I don’t do that?”
We now recognize the ways social media circles narrow our worldview. We know the feed is learning our habits to serve up more of what keeps us there.
We know to question the algorithm’s assumptions. How often do we question our own assumptions about everyone else?
I grew up in eight places around Washington: Longview, Tacoma, Vancouver, Redmond, Spokane, Colbert, Pullman and Seattle. I saw how quickly a local way of thinking can feel like the way everyone thinks.
Someone once described Kennewick, Washington to me as a small town. I doubt they’d describe Santa Monica, California that way, though the two cities have near identical populations.
In college, friends from smaller Washington towns had their own version of this. To someone from Kennewick, Wenatchee was small. To someone from Wenatchee, Cheney was small. Then came Ritzville. Then La Conner.
That judgment depends on where we’re standing. Add words like “normal,” “expensive,” “convenient,” or “obvious,” and we can carry a lot of assumptions into a brief before we’ve written a word.
We work with brands that need to connect with consumers across geographies and mindsets. Our agency conference room can be a great place to make that work…provided we remember how much of the audience isn’t in it.
During an internal review, a headline used the phrase “cheat code.” A colleague wondered whether people would get the reference. We had stronger headlines anyway, so we moved on. No great creative tragedy.
In a client video, we used an actual cheat code as a quick, two-second graphic. The client loved the nod to their Nintendo days. For viewers who recognized it, there was an extra little payoff. For everyone else, it was still a fun graphic.
Neither decision needed a research study. But when the stakes get higher and real money is on the line, are we asking the people we’re trying to reach, or are we treating our own reactions as the answer?
Psychologists call it “the false consensus effect.” And professional experience doesn’t necessarily save us. In research discussed by the American Marketing Association, marketing managers were more inclined to embrace consumer research when it agreed with their own preferences and dismiss it when it didn’t.
Even the research can become another way to hear ourselves talk.
I’m including myself. Living in different places and knowing about bias doesn’t mean I’ve graduated from having it.
The metaverse is a perfect example. Zuckerberg believed in it enough to rename his company. Across the wider metaverse boom, brands bought virtual land, built stores and staged fashion shows. In 2022, Philipp Plein’s group spent $1.4 million on land in Decentraland, celebrating how early it had arrived. A year later, attendance at Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week fell from 108,000 to 26,000.
They were first in a future ghost town.
That’s the danger of mistaking a personal belief for consumer demand. You forget to ask what your audience really wants.
So what do we do? Get curious when something doesn’t fit.
When a number seems impossibly high, look into it. When a reference feels unfamiliar, find out who knows it. When we say an audience would never do something, ask what we’re basing that on.
And talk to the people themselves. In a 2018 series of experiments, imagining someone else’s perspective didn’t consistently make people more accurate about what others thought or felt. In the final experiment, actually talking with the other person did improve accuracy.
We don’t have to get so good at imagining other people that we never need to ask them anything.
We do have to give their answers a chance to change our minds. Including when the answer is inconvenient for an idea we love, a headline we hate, or a trend we’re certain has passed.
We all recognize the insular feedback loops of our social platforms now. But we forget the loop in our heads.
That one could use a little outside input too.
