Two years into my career as a brand marketer at P&G, I led a brand campaign across ten South Asian markets. Six months of work, including stakeholder alignment, media planning, and product launch coordination, preceded the campaign launch. I was based out of the regional HQ at Singapore, so everything happened over video conferencing and telephone.
Things looked good. Until they didn’t.
Six months after launch, a project post-mortem revealed the campaign had mostly failed on the ground. Media budgets meant for the base product had been cannibalized to fund the innovation launch. The brand suffered as a result, and sales slowed down. By the time I found out, it was too late to fix.
The data I'd been happily looking at showed a campaign and product launch on track, and hitting all the metrics. The reality on the ground told a different story as far as the mother brand was concerned.
If I'd flown to India, Thailand, or Vietnam and sat with the local teams, I would have seen the budget allocation problem while it was still fixable. Those six months I spent crafting the perfect plan from 3,000 kilometres away cost me the chance to catch the problem in real time.
That failure taught me something I've carried through P&G, Reckitt, Tata, Swiggy, and now five years of consulting:
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Marketing is a contact discipline.
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The quality of your judgment is directly proportional to your proximity to unmediated reality. Every layer between you and the truth introduces distortion.
It’s not that I was lazy in Singapore. I was rigorous.
I had multiple calls with the market teams. I aligned decks with them. I made budget tracking spreadsheets. I conducted stakeholder reviews. Thought up process checkpoints. I did everything a well-trained regional marketing manager is supposed to do.
That rigour created the illusion of control while masking the reality on the ground.
This is the paradox: sophisticated planning tools can increase your distance from truth precisely because they feel so reliable. Dashboards tell you what happened, never why. Industry reports are stale and filtered through someone else's interpretation. Consensus meetings average out every distinctive point of view until nothing sharp remains.
As Rory Sutherland says in Alchemy: business and politics have become obsessed with rational quantification, attaching more importance to the purity of methodology than to the possible value of the solution.
The iPhone wasn't developed through focus-group testing. It was the monomaniacal conception of one slightly deranged man who trusted his contact with reality over everyone else's abstractions.
Think of it this way. Every layer between you and the consumer compounds error.
A focus group adds one layer — people perform for each other, tell you what sounds reasonable, not what they actually do. As Richard Shotton notes in The Choice Factory, citing data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: ask parents whether they're equally interested in their children's intelligence regardless of gender, and they'll say yes. But Google search data shows that parents are 2.5 times more likely to search "is my son gifted?" than "is my daughter gifted?"
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Don’t go by what people say; go by what they do.
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