Are Your Customers Rational Decision Makers?

Article #3 of 9 in “Unconventional Thinking”

Remember the original Star Trek series? The show's groundbreaking setting of a lonely starship encountering alternate civilizations raised pointed questions about life on earth. But it got one thing wrong. Really wrong. The series portrayed Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan, as the perfect decision-maker, overcoming his “human” urges to make a decision based on perfect Vulcan logic. But that is not how it works.

So why is this relevant to agri-marketers? We often hear from agri-marketers that: “my product is great, it is the best solution for a farmer in this particular situation, but it doesn’t seem to be getting the credit (or market share) that it deserves. Why don’t they get it?”  The assumption that “not getting it” is because the story isn’t told loud enough; or with a focus on the right feature; or to the right person (decision maker). So we’re asked to identify the right media, or a previously overlooked feature that can be used in positioning and messaging that will ensure success. Unfortunately, this is the very embodiment of product-centric thinking. The real issue is that the story may be rational to us, but not so to our customers. We assume that “rationality” is an absolute construct, when nothing could be further from the truth.

“ Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal”

The reality is that “rationality” is in the eye of the beholder. It is entirely contextual and often backward facing. As author Robert Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” We seek to impose a rational structure on our decision, even when the decision was driven by factors largely outside of our ability to describe. When we observe a customer making an irrational decision, it’s only because we don’t have insight into the full emotional context of the decision. The bridge between the appearance of irrationality and rationality is emotion.

Let’s remember the remarkable example of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose prefrontal lobe (responsible for emotion) was destroyed in a construction accident in the 1840s. We would assume that, with no emotions to clutter things up, Phineas should have been an awesome decision-maker. Wrong. Not only was his social behavior changed, he was no longer capable of even the simplest decision. 

“The bridge between irrationality and rationality is emotion.”

It took another hundred years and the discovery of much more information about the brain before we came to a basic understanding of the role and nature of emotions in decision making. If we want to consider farmers as people first, we need to understand their personal definition of rational - one that includes a lot of emotion!