What Can an Antique Duck Say about Marketing’s Reality?
In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson introduced his Digesting Duck to amazed audiences. It could move its head and wings, ingest grain, and even appear to – well, poop. What does this have to do with marketing?
Vaucanson’s contemporary, Rene Descartes asserted that the mechanical duck proved the view that everything in the world could be broken down into component parts – a concept now termed “reductionism”. It was only a matter of time, Descartes believed, that we would be able to reliably reproduce the most complex lifeforms based on their parts.
An artist’s view of how the digesting duck might have worked. Source: Wikipedia
A surprising number of businesspeople still today cling to the believe that complex systems (including markets) can be reduced to controllable components. Although, we have perhaps given up hope of reproducing the complexity of life, we think that “if only” we have enough data and enough technology – we should be able to fully understand complex systems like markets and thus predictably reproduce outcomes and ROI.
Questions like these reveal reductive, deterministic thinking about marketing:
· “How much more revenue can we get if we give you another $20,000 in budget?”
· “What will the pipeline impact be if you hire another marketer?”
· “Which one of these marketing programs will give me the most leads?”
· “What’s the one best program you conduct?”
Of course, the Digesting Duck was totally fake. It was about the size of a real duck with 400+ moving parts and sat atop a large machine that drove all the mechanics. The duck’s droppings were merely soggy breadcrumbs dyed olive green.
To give Vaucanson and Descartes credit, their work inspired and instructed generations of engineers and scientists, leading to many modern machines, including computers. And marketing data and technology have made amazing advances that enable greater insight and more predictability than ever before.
But just because something looks like a duck and walks like a duck… doesn’t mean complex systems like ducks or markets can be reduced to machines.