Why marketing is harder than rocket science

In September 1962, John F. Kennedy made the statement during one of the most historic speeches ever:  "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." Seven years later, it happened. The promise held.

Putting a man on the moon was extraordinary. It required decades of mathematics, engineering, and the kind of institutional willpower that makes you believe in human civilization. It was also, in a very specific sense, easy.

The physics involved 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. The problem is complex but also very clear. 

The human problem

Marketing has a different problem. The variable is human. And humans, unlike particles, change their minds. 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 they're doing that while doing it. They form judgments in milliseconds and then construct elaborate stories to explain them afterward.

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 actually a precise description of the problem.

This is what market research lives inside. Not the rocket's clean arc toward a calculated point in space. The messy, recursive, self-contradicting behaviour of people deciding things.

The group problem

Everywhere humans make decisions together, the variables multiply and interact in ways that resist the kind of 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 quite similar circumstances but with a change in algorithm. 

The replication crisis in marketing research makes this painfully visible. Out of the studies that other researchers have actually tried to replicate, as few as 15% confirm previous 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've advanced it Kahneman on decision-making, Cialdini on influence, Les Binet and Peter Field on effectiveness did so by treating it with the same seriousness that physicists bring to physics. They ran experiments. They tested. They revised.

The moon landing happened because Kennedy made the promise and the engineering community treated it as a problem to be solved. A budget. A deadline. A target that stayed still. Marketing has a budget. It doesn't have a deadline that matters. And the target moves.

That's why the most expensive mistake a company makes isn't a bad product. It's treating the people who might buy it as a known quantity.