Marketing Effectiveness Lessons from the Pages of Fiction. What Douglas Adams, Asimov, Pratchett, and Others Can Teach Us About Doing Marketing That Actually Works
Part 1: Asking the Right Questions and Understanding Effectiveness
Introduction: The Best Lessons Come from Outside the Bubble
Marketing effectiveness is not a formula waiting to be solved. There is no grand equation, no hidden truth buried in a spreadsheet cell and no perfect long vs short term budget ratio. And yet, too often, we act as if the right mix of data, modelling, and precision will unlock a perfect answer.
But marketing, like people, doesn’t work that way. It is unpredictable, full of contradictions, and shaped as much by gut instinct and creativity as it is by logic and measurement. The best marketing isn’t about chasing certainty, it’s about asking the right questions.
However its all too easy to find yourself head down in work, fixated on the weekly performance dashboard, searching for a new creative idea or engrossed in brand sentiment studies. Its for this reason that I have always found it helpful to look for information outside of marketing, instead of case studies or meta analysis, the best lessons often come from time-traveling hitchhikers, philosophical motorcycle mechanics, and animated pandas. Fiction has a habit of exposing human blind spots, the biases we don’t realise we have, the errors in logic we refuse to see, the inconvenient truths we overlook in favour of comforting simplicity.
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its famous warning about misinterpreting data, to Foundation and its probabilistic approach to predicting behaviour, great stories highlight something marketing analysis often misses: people are messy, irrational, and rarely follow a neat linear path to purchase. If there is an answer to marketing effectiveness, it isn’t simple.
Its for this reason that I’m sharing four lessons from fiction that have shaped how I think about marketing. These aren’t just entertaining stories. They reveal the fundamental mistakes marketers make, confusing measurement with meaning, chasing certainty where none exists, and optimising for the wrong things. This will be the first in a two part thought piece.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
“What’s the Real Question?”
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an advanced civilisation builds a supercomputer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years, it delivers a single, cryptic result: 42. The problem? No one actually knows what the question was.
Marketers, bless us, have a Deep Thought problem. We demand data, obsess over KPIs, and build increasingly sophisticated models to extract answers. Too often, we fail to ask whether we’re solving the right problem in the first place.
The Marketing Trap: Chasing Precision Over Understanding
Marketing effectiveness often suffers from this rush to answers. Consider the obsession with ROI metrics, marketing mix modelling (MMM), attribution, and brand lift studies. All are designed to spit out a neat number that supposedly defines success. But if the question isn’t well-formed to begin with, the answer is meaningless.
Advertising is simple in its goal. It makes brands more famous, more salient, and easier to buy. Yet, how often do the KPIs we measure truly reflect success? Too many metrics report activity rather than impact. Click-through rates (CTR), for instance, were once treated as a gold standard of digital advertising effectiveness, despite overwhelming evidence that clicks don’t correlate with brand growth. It’s an answer, certainly, but to the wrong question.
A real-world example: From one of my favourite IPA papers is the 2018 AA Gold Winner. The AA, a once-dominant roadside recovery brand, found itself struggling as competitors gained ground. In an effort to drive efficiency, it focused on improving the readily available performance metrics, believing that operational savings and tighter targeting would maintain its position. However, what it failed to recognise was that brand salience its long-held status as the go-to choice for breakdown recovery was quietly eroding.
Rather than asking, "How can we optimise our immediate response?", the better question was, "How do we remind people why the AA is indispensable?" The brand eventually shifted focus, investing in brand-building campaigns that reinforced its distinctive positioning, leading to a significant recovery in market share. It had optimised for a question, but not the right question.
The Takeaway for Marketers
Before obsessing over how to measure marketing effectiveness, step back and ask what actually needs measuring. Are you focused on the mechanics of measurement, or the fundamental question of how advertising drives real-world behaviour? Good marketing isn’t about producing numbers. It is about ensuring they mean something.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
The Balance Between Effort and Perfection
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig explores the idea of “quality.” He argues that true craftsmanship exists in a space between rigid perfectionism and careless execution. Obsess too much over every detail, and you’ll never finish the work. Rush to completion without care, and the end product will lack meaning and effectiveness.
This tension is deeply familiar to marketers. We often swing between two extremes: demand flawless, measurable precision in every campaign, and dismissing data entirely in favour of creative intuition. But marketing effectiveness, like craftsmanship, is neither about chasing an impossible ideal nor abandoning rigour altogether. It is about striking a balance between effort and impact.
The Marketing Trap: Striking the Right Balance Between Precision and Instinct
The key is finding the right balance between precision and instinct.
Gut instinct plays a critical role in decision-making. Data and models can guide us, but ignoring experience and creative intuition can be just as dangerous as blindly following untested hunches. The best marketers balance both, using instinct to ask the right questions and data to refine the answers.
Marketing and advertising are ultimately about understanding and influencing people. While there are core principles that guide effectiveness, there are also moments when bucking the trend or taking an unexpected path is the right decision. Knowing when to follow the playbook and when to rewrite it is what separates great marketers from the rest.
At the same time, brands must be aware of cultural movements, which unfold in different ways. Some are long, slow-burning trends that shape consumer behaviour over years. Others are short-lived, intense moments of engagement that disappear within weeks, but these moments can serve as powerful mechanics to reach new users and drive engagement in support of long-term strategies. Sustainable success comes from embedding brands in the former, but clever engagement with the latter can drive short bursts of revenue or relevance. Brands that move too slowly will miss opportunities, while those that over-focus on micro-cultural moments risk never establishing the foundation for long-term success.
A great example of this is seen in the approach of brands that focus on consistent brand-building versus those that chase short-term tactics. Successful long-term brands invest in distinctive assets, emotional connection, and broad reach, ensuring they remain mentally available. In contrast, brands that rely solely on quick tactical wins often struggle to establish lasting consumer preference.
The Takeaway for Marketers
Marketing effectiveness is not about chasing an impossible ideal or abandoning rigour altogether. The best marketers strike a balance, ensuring campaigns are based on solid strategy and creativity while resisting the urge to overcomplicate or cut corners. The key is to focus on what truly matters: building mental availability, distinctiveness, and brand salience over the long term.
Kung Fu Panda – The Myth of the Silver Bullet
There Is No Secret Ingredient
In Kung Fu Panda, Po spends much of his journey searching for the secret ingredient that will make him a great warrior, only to discover that there is no secret, success comes from consistent effort, belief, and mastering the basics. This moment is a powerful metaphor for marketing, where there is a constant hunger for a silver bullet solution.
Every year, we hear sweeping declarations: “TV is dead.” how many years were the supposed year of mobile? Share of Search became the answer to everything then fell back beneath the hype surface and the latest seems to be that “Creative is the new targeting.” These claims suggest that a single shift in technology or strategy will rewrite the rules of marketing overnight. The reality, however, is that no single channel, model, or trend will guarantee success. Instead, marketing effectiveness comes from bridging multiple approaches, balancing brand-building with activation, and using creativity to make brands mentally available over time.
The Marketing Trap: The Lure of the One-Size-Fits-All Fix
Marketing is full of grand proclamations and apparent breakthroughs. The industry loves declaring that one approach will make all others obsolete. Whether it is hyper-targeting, influencer marketing, blockchain, or AI-driven personalisation, each trend arrives with the promise of revolutionising everything. In reality, no single tactic works in isolation.
The real trap is believing that one method or tool can replace the need for a balanced, strategic approach. We have seen brands chase the latest media trend—pivoting entire budgets to digital, abandoning mass reach in favour of niche micro-targeting, or assuming a viral moment will replace years of brand-building. Each time, those who neglected the fundamentals of marketing found themselves struggling to maintain growth.
A striking example is the wave of brands that pivoted entirely to digital and performance marketing, believing traditional advertising was obsolete. Many soon realised that while digital platforms provide measurable short-term gains, they struggled to build long-term mental availability. Even digital-first giants like Airbnb eventually shifted back to investing in brand-building, recognising that sustained success comes from a mix of creativity, distinctiveness, and broad reach, not a single magic formula.
But this isn’t just about digital. The same mistake has played out across decades, from brands obsessing over direct mail in the ‘80s, CRM databases in the 2000s, and content marketing more recently. Each was valuable in its own right, but none could replace the need for broad reach, consistent investment, and distinctive brand-building.
The Takeaway for Marketers
There is no silver bullet. Effective marketing is never about one perfect solution but about the right combination of creativity, reach, and relevance.
Balance is everything. Performance marketing delivers immediate returns, but long-term brand success requires consistent investment in broad, emotionally engaging advertising.
Master your fundamentals. Just as Po became the Dragon Warrior by embracing his strengths and weakness, being disciplined and practice over searching for shortcuts, brands succeed by getting the basics right: clear positioning, creative distinctiveness, and mental availability.
The greatest marketing strategies aren’t built on chasing the next big thing. They’re built on understanding how people think, how brands grow, and how creativity drives attention and memory. Just like Po, the brands that succeed aren’t the ones searching for a secret ingredient, they’re the ones that realise they never needed one.
The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
The Tyranny of Averages and the Illusion of Control
In Foundation, Isaac Asimov introduces the concept of psychohistory. It is an advanced mathematical model that can, with incredible accuracy, predict the broad movements of civilisation but not the actions of individuals. Hari Seldon, the protagonist, doesn’t attempt to forecast specific events. Instead, he works with probabilities, identifying long-term trends and making strategic interventions to nudge history in the right direction.
Psychohistory is a useful analogy for marketing because both disciplines deal with complex systems that cannot be precisely controlled. Just as Seldon accepted that individual actions were unpredictable but that large-scale trends could be influenced, marketers must recognise that consumer behaviour is not deterministic. We cannot predict exactly who will buy, when they will buy, or what specific ad will trigger a sale. However, we can stack the odds in our favour by using reach, creativity, and consistent brand-building to shape long-term consumer behaviour. This is where marketing often goes wrong. Many brands believe they can precisely forecast campaign results, predict consumer behaviour down to the last decimal point, or create models that remove uncertainty altogether.
The reality is far messier. Marketing effectiveness is often viewed through the lens of averages—average ROI, average engagement, average consumer response. These aggregated metrics offer comforting simplicity, but they mask a much more complex reality: people do not behave like averages. Just as Seldon’s psychohistory worked with probabilities rather than absolutes, marketing must move beyond a fixation on single-number solutions and embrace the full distribution of outcomes.
The same campaign can deliver radically different results depending on context, audience, and execution. A brand-building ad might work wonders for one group while being ignored by another. A media channel might generate extraordinary returns in one situation and fail entirely in another. Yet marketing models often smooth out these variations, chasing a misleading sense of certainty.
Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that there is no 'perfect Pepsi,' only 'perfect Pepsis' different formulations suited to different tastes. The same applies to marketing effectiveness. There is no singular formula for success, only strategies that maximise the probability of success across a broad and unpredictable consumer landscape.
The best marketing strategies are built on probabilities, not guarantees. Instead of trying to control every variable, brands should focus on increasing the likelihood of success, through reach, creativity, and consistent brand-building over time. They want deterministic answers: “If we spend £X, we will generate £Y in return.” But like psychohistory, real-world marketing doesn’t work that way. The best strategies are not about absolute certainty. They focus on stacking the odds in your favour.
The Takeaway for Marketers
Stop chasing deterministic precision. No model can fully predict individual behaviour. Effective marketing is about increasing the probability of success, not guaranteeing specific outcomes.
Maximise impact, not just measurability. The strongest brands aren’t those that track everything, but those that use reach, creativity, and distinctiveness to make themselves unforgettable.
Look beyond averages. Effectiveness isn’t a single number but a distribution of outcomes. Instead of smoothing out variance, marketers should embrace complexity and optimise for broad behavioural patterns.
Conclusion: The Foundation for Better Marketing
Marketing isn’t a science experiment. There is no formula, no tidy equation where input A leads neatly to output B. It’s a messy, probabilistic discipline shaped by creativity, psychology, and human behaviour. And that means success does not come from chasing certainty, rather embracing complexity.
The most effective strategies aren’t built on seeking absolute answers. They’re built on **asking sharper questions, **about what truly drives growth, about whether I’m focussed what matters, about whether I’m optimising for the right things.
Because in the end, marketing isn’t about finding the perfect model. It’s about shaping the conditions for success. It’s about ensuring that when the moment of choice arrives, my brand is the one people think of first.
In Part 2, I’ll move from why marketing effectiveness is misunderstood to how to build better strategies, through creativity, distinctiveness, and the power of brand storytelling. Because at the end of the day, people don’t buy based on logic alone. They buy into stories, emotions, and ideas that stick.