Being a ‘reasonable skeptic’ is a 5-Star skill that makes you invaluable.
Do you agree?
A marketer’s need for Enquiry is like a captain’s necessity for steering the ship through the storm.
As a captain — your crew, your ship, and your passengers depend on you. And, in the face of crisis, you’re expected to take the best trade-off between ‘change course’ or ‘stay the course’.
Similarly, if marketers don’t navigate between ‘learning off what you already know’ and ‘let’s not stop till we know the actual truth’, they can NEVER find the goldilocks zone of information sufficiency.
As most researchers will agree, most of the times, consumer truths are buried between layers of spoken words, obscure behaviours and socio-cultural ways of being.
What this means in the marketing context is that, most of the stimuli and responses are un-palpable to the eye and carry inbuilt and varying weightages of error (and bias).
And, through information-overdose-storms like these, is where, most marketers develop their streak of neuroticism.
This is where they build their judgement markers, and the mental muscle of choosing between being ‘open-minded’ or being a ‘skeptic’.
Being a skeptic, though highly debated, is actually a net-positive behavioral trait that can be helpful to marketers:
1. Skepticism can help you to separate feelings from actions → It can help you delay and suspend judgment for a reasonable time, allowing your ideas to settle. SO valuable!, when you’re neck-deep in data and choosing between your radical wisdom and what the data doesn’t tell you yet. You learn to draw the line between what you know and what you ought to know, and can decide whether to take action on the known-knowns.
2. Skeptics are naturally humble about rationality → They understand that feelings often masquerade as logic. We see it in others, and it’s true for us too. They learn how to discern better, and take reasonable account of what “is” and what is “felt”.
3. And my personal favourite-> I have come to understand that skeptics revise their beliefs readily → they learn to make better mental trade-offs during decision making.
Their conclusions are provisional, as they recognize that today’s certainty might be tomorrow’s doubt.
They see that the human mind is intermittent — it can’t access all its thoughts at once, and hence they are able to recognize brain flaws.
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