You Never Know

You can’t be 100% cer­tain.  Werner Heisen­berg made this point in his exper­i­ments with sub­atomic par­ti­cles.  Heisen­berg stated while you can approx­i­mate both the veloc­ity and posi­tion of a par­ti­cle at a spe­cific instant in time, it is impos­si­ble to exactly mea­sure both.  The more tightly you focus in on one mea­sur­ing one aspect, the less cer­tain you can be about the other.  Fur­ther, the sim­ple act of mea­sure­ment itself will alter the outcome.

I believe this the­ory has some inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions for mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als.  As we move into a dig­i­tal world, there are so many things we can mea­sure about peo­ple.  What they say, who they are friends with, what games they play online, what they “like” on Face­book, what they Tweet about, where they check-in on Foursquare, and on and on and on.  This data opens up immense poten­tial to under­stand more about peo­ple.  The data that is being gath­ered and ana­lyzed is pro­duc­ing mind-boggling insights about our col­lec­tive and indi­vid­ual behav­ior.  This data is extremely valu­able, and rep­re­sents the future direc­tion of busi­ness.  Yet it is not per­fect, and never will be per­fect.  Like sub­atomic par­ti­cles it is sim­ply impos­si­ble to mea­sure and pre­dict what humans will do with 100% cer­tainty.   The greater empha­sis that is placed on one sin­gle moti­va­tional fac­tor, the less cer­tain you can be about oth­ers.  You can assess prob­a­bil­i­ties about what will hap­pen, but the real­ity is you never know.

Although you can’t be cer­tain, that does not mean you should just blindly guess or aban­don mea­sur­ing all together.  Mea­sure­ment is a crit­i­cal part of mar­ket­ing, and one that is rapidly get­ting eas­ier and much more use­ful.  You can now have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what to sell, what price point to use, what chan­nels are most effec­tive, what peo­ple love and hate about your brand, and so much more.  You can mon­i­tor opin­ions, gauge per­for­mance, and col­lect sales infor­ma­tion in real time from all around the globe.  You can learn a great deal from data — but you can’t learn every­thing.  You can never com­pletely elim­i­nate the risk of the future no mat­ter how much you mea­sure.  Yet every­day busi­nesses reg­u­larly find them­selves in a state of paral­y­sis by analy­sis, search­ing for the per­fect answer instead of actu­ally act­ing on a prob­a­ble out­come.  They are unwill­ing to take risks until the course of future is seem­ingly cer­tain — which, of course, is an illusion.

We can’t mea­sure the future.  What we can do is con­tin­u­ously use data to be rea­son­ably con­fi­dent in prob­a­bil­ity, real­is­tic in expec­ta­tion, and respon­sive to the results of our mea­sure­ments.  We look for trends.  We address the obvi­ous.  We dig deeper where appro­pri­ate.  But we real­ize that we can’t ever be cer­tain.  Per­haps you can sim­ply use the teach­ings of Heisen­berg to move you from wait­ing for the per­fect answer, the ideal sce­nario, the one big chance to accept­ing the uncer­tainty of the uni­verse and choos­ing to make some­thing hap­pen.  You never know what might happen.