In September 1962, John F. Kennedy promised the moon. Seven years later, someone stood on it.
He put it this way: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The promise held.
Putting a man on the moon was extraordinary. It took decades of mathematics, decades of engineering, and the kind of institutional willpower that makes you believe in human civilisation again.
It was also, in a very specific sense, easy.
The physics is fixed
Gravity pulls the same way every time. Atmospheric drag follows known equations. A rocket behaves according to rules written into the fabric of the universe.
Model the variables correctly, account for enough of them, and the rocket goes where you aim it. Complex, and entirely clear.
The human problem
Marketing has a different problem. The variable is human. And humans change their minds; particles don’t.
They contradict themselves between Tuesday and Friday. They tell you they want one thing and buy another. They pay a premium for a product they believe makes them look a certain way, and they’ll deny it while doing it. They form judgements in milliseconds and then build an elaborate story around them.
Physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once observed: think how hard physics would be if particles could think.
He meant it as a side note. It’s a precise description of the problem.
This is what market research lives inside. A rocket traces a clean arc towards a calculated point in space. Market research watches the messy, recursive, self-contradicting behaviour of people deciding things.
The group problem
Everywhere humans decide together, the variables multiply and interact in ways that resist the clean modelling that sent Apollo 11 to the Sea of Tranquility.
The difficulty is scale, and the fact that the subject contains the observers. The particles are watching each other.
Marketing sits at the intersection of all of this. It asks: given what psychology does, given what sociology reveals, what do you say, to whom, at what moment, in what form, to move people to act?
And then it tries to measure whether it worked, in systems so noisy that the same strategy produces different results in different markets, different quarters, different contexts, and even in near-identical circumstances with one algorithm changed.
Fifteen percent
The replication crisis in marketing research makes this painfully visible. Of the studies other researchers have actually tried to replicate, as few as 15% confirm the earlier findings.
Fifteen percent. This is not a field that rewards overconfidence.
The hard thing about hard things
None of this means marketing is impossible. It means marketing is genuinely hard.
The people who have advanced it, Kahneman on decision-making, Cialdini on influence, Les Binet and Peter Field on effectiveness, did so by treating it with the seriousness physicists bring to physics. They ran experiments. They tested. They revised.
The moon landing happened because Kennedy made the promise and the engineers treated it as a problem to be solved. A budget. A deadline. A target that stayed still.
Marketing has a budget. It has no deadline that matters. And the target moves.
That’s why the most expensive mistake a company makes is rarely a bad product. It’s treating the people who might buy it as a known quantity.
