Economics + Behavioral Psychology + Sociology Equals What?

As if touched by God, a few economists have come to a stunning conclusion. People don't always act completely rationally. Yeah, I know. Really amazing. Yet the field of economics has always had at its heart the assumption that people act in their own best economic interest. As an economics student, I or one of my classmates would sometimes ask about cases where a person might be motivated to make a choice not in their own economic self interest. The answer was that, summing up my professor's long winded response, since we can't model that, we don't worry about it. Now we are confronted with the results of economic policy that ignored the behavioral elements and focused solely on the "rational man". And this isn't just a phenomenon of the last eight years. It's always been this way.

So the Nobel Prize and kudos galore are going to economists that are working on integrating the fields of Economics, Behavioral Psychology, and Sociology in the hopes of creating tools and models that better reflect the real world and will lead to more stable economic outcomes.

Okay, so the point of all this in a blog about marketing. Well, isn't the combination of economics, behavioral psych, and sociology basically marketing? The economists have found their field hollow at the core and they've come a'poaching in our territory! Which is actually good news because, frankly, our tools are pretty inadequate to the task. Especially in an era when marketing must now be as accountable as any other part of the organization. The tools that marketers do have, for the most part, are horribly complex, expensive, and generally tough to use.

Marketers are collecting terabytes of customer data each day, but generally fail to explore the meaning of the data to any great depth. But here's an opportunity to leverage emerging thinking from the field of economics to craft tools that better meet our needs, helping us to model behavior in such a way as to finally be able to quantify the underlying drivers of behavior so we can begin to reliably communicate with prospects and customers in a meaningful and impactful way.

So here's the advice, rarely ever heard before by marketers. "Pay attention to the economists." Sounds funny just saying it.