Carl kept shifting in his seat, trying to feign real interest in Isabella’s presentation. In less than ten minutes, he had to present the Board with the latest figures on the Anna 2000 project results and clear the path for future spin-off projects, and there was no time to waste. Ten months from now they planned to declare themselves a public company. That would make it five years to the day since Isabella invited him to the sushi place they both hated.

—

“Human behavior can be very irrational,” she stated, while he studied the menu.  Fish. And more fish. He remembered reflexively replying something to the effect that she could certainly say that again! Being in this restaurant for example.

“No—seriously,” she resumed when he had turned his head away, searching for the waitress. His recollection of the conversation had her calm and collected, given her obvious burning passion. A passion he normally shared with her, if it weren’t for the awful prospect of having fish for lunch.

“But a lot of irrational decisions – and I quote here – are actually optimal, but made unconsciously on the basis of hidden interests that are not known to the conscious mind.” He wished she would stop talking like a book. Still failing to get the waitress’s attention, he now wondered what “hidden interest” had made him agree on meeting in this highly overrated, overpriced and noisy sushi bar. He hated sushi.

“The opposite is also true,” she continued.  “Some seemingly rational behavior is actually completely illogical. You should know all about that!”

He did. As a marketing and sales dinosaur, he had spent most of his career executing tactics to make people believe they acted logically when dealing with his well-crafted pitches. What had he been thinking when he agreed coming to this restaurant?

“But perceived rational behavior isn’t what interests me. That’s your turf and there is nothing I can add you don’t already know. And you are bored with it anyway.”

A hint of a smile. She was flattering him, but it was true. He had seen it all and knew every trick there was in the book. The waitress was nowhere to be seen. He really didn’t want to be here.

“What is much more interesting is perceived irrationality. Which is not the same as random behavior. If irrational behavior would be random, we wouldn’t be able to predict it.” She was unstoppable.

She was also right. It was perfectly possible to predict irrational behavior. Parents were exceptionally good at it. Spouses as well. Friends to a lesser extent. Their predictive abilities were all based on experience provided by close contact and frequent interaction with a person, though. An intimacy that could never be matched by marketeers trying to predict the behavior of – preferably – larger populations than just one individual. Yet, this was precisely their job description. No wonder the waste in the marketing process was enormous.

The waitress arrived.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Isabella said, with a genuine apologetic look on her face. “My friend here doesn’t feel well. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave. I’m so sorry”.

—

Outside, it hit him. She had just used his own terrorize-then-relieve strategy on him.

“How did you… “, he began.

“I’m tutoring your teenage daughter, Carl. She told me a thing or two about how you get your way with people. And she also told me you hate fish. Now, let’s have a hotdog.”

Carefully trying not to spill mustard on her coat, she continued their earlier conversation. “Parents, spouses and friends don’t do magic when they pick up these signs for future behavior. They use historical “data”. And if they can do that, so can we. Irrational behavior is quantifiable.”

She had snared him now. Everybody in the industry would love to see irrationality quantifiable, though no one could pretend having gotten to the root of the problem. She probably knew that. Of course she knew that. This was precisely why she had insisted on talking to him.

“Makes perfect sense, but why hasn’t anyone done it before?” he asked.

“It has been done. It is still being done. With very poor results. If you try to find the right question to an answer you already know, you need a massive amount of data to prove your question right. Otherwise it’s just plain apophenia. Or wishful thinking.”

He thought about that. They were now strolling down an elegant stretch of a side street normally closed off to vehicles. The place was decked with flowers, ornate wrought-iron benches and an alluring mix of fragrances rising out of the restaurant grills. He bought two giant milkshakes from a street vendor. He had grinned at the idea that this meeting started to look more and more like a date.

“Where are you going with this?” he asked her bluntly. It was obvious she had something for him and although he was enjoying her company, he felt slightly uncomfortable being on the receiving end of what clearly was a sales talk.

“Nobody has succeeded yet in coming up with results accurate enough to be practical, simply because we never had enough empirical data to work on. Until now.”

He knew about the big data hype.

“Are you asking me to invest in your predictive analysis start-up? You’re a little late with that, you know.”

“Glad you ask,” she replied, with a mischievous smile. “Start-up? Yes. Predictive analysis? Certainly. Big data? Definitely. Massive data, I’d even say. But that’s not all. I have an even better proposal.”

He sat down on a bench. “I’m listening”.

“Prediction only would bore you quite soon, I’m sure. You predict, and then you react. But what if the prediction is not your desired outcome? Wouldn’t it be better if you could predict behavior, and then root out the undesired outcomes?”

“You mean, make people do what you want?” he rephrased her. He really needed to talk to her about her delivery…

“Yes. That’s what advertising is trying to do anyway, isn’t it? So, it is in no way different from advertising goals as they are today. With the only difference that we wouldn’t be shooting blind anymore. “

“The holy grail of marketing”, Carl mused.

“The holy grail of marketing”.

“And how do we do that?”

“By getting really close, “ she replied. “And I’ll first tell you how we will not do that.”

She gave him an envelope. It was a plain advertisement envelope coming from a tour operator.

“Been on holidays?” he asked.

“Yes. In summer. I keep receiving offers from them now.”

Isabella had clearly made no attempt to take a look at the contents; it was still closed.

“Why haven’t you opened it?”

“Look at the back” she replied.

He flipped it over. On the back it said “Dear Isabella, you found your last trip to Greece in our last year’s brochure. Open this envelope quickly to discover your next summer holiday!”

“Personalized advert. Not very inspired, but clear and effective. They probably offer an interesting discount. Are you going to book again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Look at the address”

He flipped the envelope back to read the address. He immediately saw what was wrong.

“They got your gender wrong. The idiots. Unbelievable.”

He placed his lips on the straw sticking out of his paper cup and pulled a refreshing shot of vanilla milkshake. Mistakes like these were commonplace in his early days in marketing, but the advertising model was different then. They had names and addresses, and that was about it. Nowadays, people had reluctantly but surely accepted the idea that privacy was a thing of the past. Isabella probably had had to register, fill in a form with more questions that were actually needed to validate her plane ticket and even pay some junk fee for the administration of her personal data. In return, the least such a company could do was having the courtesy to address their customers properly. There was no excuse for this.

“This is just an old fashioned boring letter, which I will never read,” she stopped and theatrically dropped it in a waste bin. “But this very same company is trying to win my trust with very well designed storytelling adverts on my facebook page.” She seemed agitated.

“And I don’t believe a single word of it. Probably because they do know so much about us. And trying to be our friend isn’t helping. It’s creepy. Even if they do get my gender right. So this poor attempt at trying to be authentic is not how we’re going to get close”.

“So, how do we win consumer trust then?” he had asked.

“With magnets”, she had replied.

“Magnets?”

“Magnets”.

—

He looked at his watch. Isabella and her audience had been suffering though her presentation for five minutes now. She was on her seventh slide. Time to activate Stage Two of his Bored Member strategy. He sent out a text and ten seconds later, Isabella’s presentation was rudely interrupted by the loud and old-fashioned ring tone of the conference phone in the middle of the table.