Limitations of Marketing
From an outdated model...
"Marketing's going bad." Philip Kotler himself is the one who makes this observation*, recalling that "75% of new products, services or business start-ups are doomed to failure" because of manifest errors in marketing strategy. Matt Haig has compiled a tasty compilation of it in his book 100 big flops of the big brands (Dunod, 2011). An example? Coca Cola launches its New Coke after millions of dollars invested in research, both on consumer expectations and better price/distribution positioning. For a catastrophic result - the product disappears in three months.
But Coca Cola is far from being an isolated case. The frequency and variety of failures are so numerous, from failed launches to disappointing campaigns, that the expression "it's marketing" has taken on a pejorative connotation - it's false, it's artificial. This situation can only be explained by a failure of the model traditionally used to design these strategies.
Why? The traditional marketing model was created at a time when we were convinced that the behaviour of decision-makers or consumers could be modelled, that they were as predictable as the calculation of a trajectory. Given what my market research has revealed to me about the behaviour of my targets, if I sell my product A at such a price via such a network, I will make such a turnover.
* The 10 Deadly Sins in Marketing, Maxima Publishing, 2007.
… to a new model inspired by the physical sciences
Indeed, marketing "targets" are human beings. Their behaviour is not always logical. It is even less and less so because the environment is increasingly complex, changing and multiform. Today, a decision maker can receive conflicting stimuli (advertising messages, a friend's commentary, an internal rating in a company) that make him change his mind several times in an instant.
More importantly, the very notion of target becomes blurred. The under-50 housewife is increasingly taking the advice of her children, themselves influenced by their Facebook community. Similarly in B2B, few buyers are nowadays acting independently of their environment (employees, colleagues, consultants...). This distorts the overly simple assumptions of the traditional marketing model, which is unable to translate market irrationality as a real component of business.
There is an area of knowledge that has troubling similarities with this situation. This is the field of the physical sciences. And indeed, to look at it carefully, the behaviour of the B2C consumer or the B2B decision maker is strangely similar to that of a particle in the world of the infinitely small.
The road to Quantum Marketing
From quantum physics...
At the beginning of the 20th century, the world of science was in turmoil. The measuring instruments have been considerably improved (telescopes, microscopes). Surprisingly, some observations, those concerning the infinitely small objects, the particles, radically call into question Newton's Laws, which have been at the root of physics since their publication in 1687.
For example, Max Planck's study of the amount of energy emitted by light bulbs leads to the conclusion that electrons release energy in packets, the quantas (hence the name quantum mechanics), suggesting a discontinuity in the space frame (a theory illustrated much later by Lana and Andy Wachowski's film "Matrix"). Other discoveries show that each particle that constitutes us can adopt several states at the same time, but that it "chooses" its state if we observe it. Or that some of them are intertwined - any change in one instantly modifies the other, even if it is at the other end of the universe, faster than the speed of light.
Did you say weird?
... to quantum marketing
Strange behavior, certainly, and nonetheless very real, proved by experiments. Because they accepted this strangeness and then dismantled its mechanisms, quantum physicists are behind the creation of some of today's most popular inventions: the laser, the transistor (the heart of any electronic object, starting with your computer), the GPS, MRI devices, photoelectric cells that open all the automatic doors of the whole world... More than a third of the PNB According to Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, the world's third largest IT company, in terms of IT,"the next generation is quantum computing.
However, quantum mechanics also seems to adapt to these elementary particles of the market that are decision-makers. In the following pages, we will compare 5 main principles of quantum mechanics (intrication, quantification, indeterminacy, superposition, non commutativity) with the behaviour of a prospect. For each of them, we will first present the limitations of classical marketing thinking, corroborated by an expert; then we will present the quantum principle and our recommendation for applying it to marketing strategy.
These parallels do not form a complete system of thought. At this stage, we do not intend to rethink the marketing mix model, but introduce new variables and stimulate debate. We also want to highlight the extreme complexity of modeling a marketing strategy. Or, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in 1965 for his work on quantum mechanics: "I think I can say that if you think you understand the behaviour of a decision maker, you don't understand it.
