The Irrational Case for Irrational Marketing

Let me make an argument that will make your finance team uncomfortable.

The most strategically sound thing your marketing organization can do is make decisions that cannot be justified in a spreadsheet.

I am not arguing for recklessness. I am arguing for something more precise and more counterintuitive. The tools we use to evaluate marketing, the dashboards, the attribution models, the A/B tests, are structurally biased toward mediocrity. They measure what is easy to measure. And what is easy to measure is almost never what is actually moving the needle.

There is a particular organizational pathology I think of as the spreadsheet mafia. It is the institutional tendency to prefer precise but wrong answers over vague but true ones. A campaign with measurable, defensible, modest results will always win the budget argument over a campaign that might work extraordinarily well but cannot be fully explained in advance. The result, in aggregate, is an industry that systematically defunds its own best ideas.

Logic, consistently applied, gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. When every decision is made by the same analytical framework against the same data, every competitor arrives at approximately the same strategy. The market converges. Differentiation evaporates. And then someone who was willing to do something that looked irrational on a spreadsheet comes along and takes the category. If you don't believe me, think about the last time you walked a conference show floor. Cover the logo on any booth and tell me which company it belongs to. You probably can't. Neither can I.

Consider what the rational brief for storytelling-led marketing looks like inside most organizations. It requires accepting that you cannot perfectly attribute outcomes to inputs. It requires investing in content that is not directly tied to a product message. It requires building something whose effects compound over time rather than delivering a measurable spike in the quarter it launches. None of these things survive a standard ROI conversation.

I face this problem with Threat Vector. When I started the podcast I didn't have a model I could point to and say "this will work." Even today, I am constantly trying to figure out how to prove that the podcast is working, that it is tied to revenue. I have downloads. I have ways of showing that people visit our episode pages and then are tagged in deals that close. I have listeners reach out to say they love the show and sellers telling me they are avid fans. But I do not have an easy metric to demonstrate ROI. Fortunately I am a good storyteller and have a leadership team that intuitively understands there is value even when there is no easy button to measure it.

This is the paradox that most organizations never resolve. The thing that works best is the thing that is hardest to prove. So they fund what they can prove, which works less well. They gradually defund what they cannot prove, which works more.

This is not a marketing problem. It is a cognitive bias problem. We are systematically overconfident in the explanatory power of logic and systematically underconfident in solutions that cannot be articulated rationally. We trust the legible over the illegible, the measurable over the real, the defensible over the true.

The corrective is not to abandon measurement. It is to hold measurement in its proper place. Engagement metrics tell you something. Pipeline attribution tells you something. But the question of whether your story is changing how your market thinks about your category, whether it is building a position that compounds rather than depreciates, none of that shows up on a dashboard by Thursday.

The organizations that build lasting positions understand this at a structural level. They protect investment in narrative the way they protect investment in infrastructure, not because each expenditure produces a trackable return, but because the whole edifice depends on it. They accept that the most important things they are doing cannot be fully measured. They make peace with that asymmetry.

What this requires, practically, is a different kind of courage than most marketing leaders are asked to demonstrate. Not the courage to run a bold campaign. The courage to stand in a budget meeting and argue for something that cannot be fully justified by the numbers, because you understand something the numbers cannot capture.

That is a harder argument to make. It is also the right argument.

The question to sit with is this: if your entire marketing strategy could be defended line by line in a spreadsheet, what does that tell you about your competitors' ability to replicate it?

This is the third article in a five-part series on the alchemy of story in marketing.