Straight to the ‘sauce’(source) a technique for generating marketing insight:

Disclaimer: This is not marketing advice and is for educational purposes only. Please consult your adored & idolized marketing guru for personalized marketing advice.

I think most of the time, things are watered down for simplicity’s sake.

You use words with less ‘embedded meaning’ in favor of another word that simplifies, or makes the concept more relatable.

This means that in the explanation of concepts, usually to a mass market,

What happens is that you get less ‘exploratory trigger nodes’ for each of the concepts that you are using.

It’s an inherent limitation in system design… and it’s why I usually try to avoid talking about techniques, instead, I like to talk about the ‘inquisitive process’, and the evaluation of premises.

So that way, I get both an accurate, and precise picture of what the market actually looks like.

Precision, without accuracy, is like saying my answer has 20 decimal places, like 1.2332345340593405834, but the reality of the answer is like 5.

Precise, but not accurate.

Accurate, is saying that… my answer is 4.7, but it doesn’t have that degree of decimal places to your work.

With both precision and accuracy, my thesis, is that you have higher converting conversion pieces, because you’re able to reflect the *reality* of amarkets desire.

So that’s why I’ve paid attention to the initial ‘starting points’ of creating new knowledge.

And that leads me to 2 forms of knowledge that philosophers mostly, scientists ( I think) use to derive their proof.

I won’t be delving into statistical significance, because I’m not very good at that — so maybe another time.

But what I will be going into — is ‘A Priori’ & and ‘A Posteriori’

Another thing that has always a priori, a posteriori — and the use of each of these concepts in developing insight about your customer.

You use this to ‘evaluate claims’ and to find the ‘first principles’ to understand why your promotions work– or at least this is how my process looks like.

Here’s the explanation of these 2 terms:

A Priori: -> You’re looking at ‘if-then’ statements. Basically, you’re using an existing schema of knowledge, proposed to be ‘true’… and discovering new ‘possibilities’ with what has already been ‘presupposed’ to be true.

Imagine, like math.

If 1 + 1 =2,

then 1 +1 +1 =3

or in other words,

Claim + Proof = believable

It’s a linear process, with proof being built into them.

Seems simple enough, right?

So basically, you have a few basic rules– and you symbol shunt your way into finding out what’s possible in the system that you have.

You can do this with existing marketing literature — and symbol shunt your way, into seeing the possibilities of what’s possible.

Ie, if you’re a copywriter, you have a template — and then you see what are all the possible expressions within that template, possibly even reaching the scope of problem sets, that the given template can solve.

A Posteriori -> You’re looking at things as they are. You’re looking at empirical evidence. You’re looking at things that HAVE already happened, and are happening now. And you can confirm that the fact is true, simply because it has happened.

So for this, you can say that– you see an apple, so the apple is there.

Simple enough.

Yet, when we try to look a little deeper, we still need to make sure that our ‘labels’ are accurate…

And that we have an existing set of labels to properly document each ‘event’.

First, we must know what the apple is, before we can say that something is an apple.

So, how is this relevant to marketing?

I think with these 2 concepts, of learning how to derive proof… you’re able to question the foundations of your premises… and it gives you awareness of why you believe what you believe — and from there, you have more control to ‘tweak’ your systems, to make them more profitable, more accurate, and more precise too, allowing for higher cashflows, and less mistakes.

So it’s just a lens to see why you’re believing what you’re believing.

I guess next time, I’ll look into other argumentative structures like strawman, and how people ‘assemble cases’… might even look into law literature lol. Who knows where this is going.

The only thing I know, is that I find this incredibly fascinating.

Cheers,

Zander.