• by Prodeep Bose , Columnist, October 2, 2015

Why do physicians continue to prescribe drugs that they have “experience” with over newer drugs with better clinical profiles? Why is there patient noncompliance in life-threatening disease categories? Why do some parents choose not to vaccinate their children? Why do guidelines for treatment issued across disease conditions always lag behind in-market treatment options? 

Because humans and the organizations we build are far less rational than we tend to give ourselves credit for. Because habit, comfort, experience, and beliefs are factors that are beyond the immediate reach of the neocortex of the brain responsible for logical step-by-step thinking. 

In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt, a well-regarded psychologist and professor, posits that morals (i.e., belief systems) are shaped by intuition, upbringing, and genetics and lie beyond the immediate reach of logical cognitive processes. He compares our human intuitive belief system that makes instant judgments to an elephant being ridden by its relatively tiny rider—the intellect. And for the most part, the job of the intellect is to rationalize the choice that the elephant has already made instantaneously, rather than shape the choice. 

Humans judge. And judging—instantly and constantly—is what has made us the most successful, populous, and resourceful (if not exploitative) animal on the planet. And regardless of 2,000-year-old admonitions to the contrary, we continue to judge everything and everyone all the time. Let’s not try to hide behind a fig leaf of framing this as a process of evaluation—which is a rational understanding and selection of options at hand. It isn’t. Human beliefs and resulting actions are powered by personal beliefs—shaped by our social, psychological, experiential, historical, emotional, and, yes, rational faculties to make a judgment, be it an internal one or an externalized decision. 

What we can hope and aspire to do, however, is to use increasingly meaningful and subtle criteria to make our judgments and continue to refine them over time. And that’s where marketing has a compelling effect—in shaping the criteria by which we judge a patient, a doctor, a medicine, a prognosis, how much effort to put into changing one’s lifestyle, and so on. And there is a chasm that digital marketers need to be able to bridge between rational drivers and belief systems that compel customers to judge and choose.

Digital marketers are trained rational thinkers. And for the most part, it is only natural that we should have evolved to be so, given the nature of digital marketing that has been shaped by call-to-action–oriented campaigns, hyper-targeted media, data-driven triggers for communications, etc. And historically, much of the discipline has been shaped by adapting basic principles of e-commerce—from usability to cross-selling to segmentation and personalization. 

But we need to take a long hard stare at the elephant in the room—belief systems that shape customer behavior. And weave in the human factors to shape beliefs—it’s not just what is being communicated, but who is delivering it and how it is delivered that makes people want to engage. 

We have tribal instincts—we are drawn to things that we already agree with and people that we find familiar—and while the Internet has done wonders to expose and connect diversity of thought, geography, and social habits, the discipline of changing peoples’ minds and hearts is about engagement, and it’s a much broader idea than marketing.