Marketers have spent decades chasing the myth of the independent consumer, as if people make up their minds alone, unaffected by the context of their peers, groups, or what is happening all around them.

Ever since ancient gamblers cast lots and rolled knucklebones, people have chased chance. Games of chance have been played for millennia, yet it wasn’t until the 17th century that we began to decipher probability itself. Before Pascal and Fermat, luck was lore: unpredictable and unquantifiable.

Brian Wilson died last month at 82, and in the outpouring of tributes one word kept surfacing: “genius.”

I had the privilege of working on shows for Brian including the Pet Sounds 40th Anniversary Tour, Brian Wilson Presents Smile, and the All-Star Tribute to Brian at Radio City Music Hall.  Like so many, I believe Brian Wilson was a genius. His music shaped generations.

If you work in brand strategy, you’ll know that most marketing decisions are made using spreadsheets. Logical, predictable, rational. But customers? They’re none of those things.

Which is why the Dishoom Matka is worth studying.

Let’s be honest. Neoclassical economics doesn’t hate marketing. It just thinks marketing should live in the attic and only come down after the guests have left.

One of my favorite episodes of the show Parks and Recreation is titled “The Camel”. The Parks team is asked to design a new mural for a government building. Each department submits an entry. Each one is bad. But rather than choose the least awful, they do something worse. They combine them. What they end up with is not just a compromise, but a crime scene. What comes out is a mural that looks like it was drawn by a committee of well-meaning toddlers after a gas leak. A camel.

There is something wonderfully elegant about a business that knows what it stands for. Boston Market used to be one of them.

Some management ideas sound super efficient until people actually have to follow them through. Take DOGE’s “5 Things” email policy. Every federal employee was told to send five bullet points every week summarizing their accomplishments. On paper, it looks like accountability. In practice, it became an administrative paperweight to be mocked and ridiculed. One more thing to place atop the “Elon looks like an idiot” pile.

It starts subtly. You notice your ideas are greeted with polite nods (or even silence) instead of enthusiasm. You hit your targets, but the recognition is muted. Then someone less experienced gets a high-profile project. Worse still, decisions that affect your role are being made in meetings you’re not in.

For all the praise heaped on ChatGPT’s convenience, there is strong evidence of an inconvenient truth: users' brains are taking the cognitive hit.

There’s something wonderfully predictable about bad marketing copy. You can smell it before you see it. It usually arrives accompanied by a parade of adjectives each trying to sound more important than the last.

I once watched a normally mild colleague morph into a territorial grizzly. Management had announced that our office would be converted into a hot-desking "collaborative space," vaporizing his beloved corner office. To an outsider, his outburst looked absurd (who fights that hard over a desk?), but in that moment he was effectively defending his cave. This little melodrama was a perfect case study in our brain’s social wiring, which neuroscientist David Rock captured with the SCARF model (Rock, 2008).

I have a confession: I’m a terribly impatient learner. If I pick up a new skill, I want to be halfway decent at it by, oh, yesterday. Naturally, this has led me down some strange rabbit holes in search of quicker ways to get smarter.

The In Rainbows Experiment: Crazy or Brilliant?

In 2007, Radiohead took a leap of faith that baffled industry experts. With no record label ties at the time, the band released its seventh album, In Rainbows, as a digital download and famously told fans: pay whatever you want...even zero.

Some of the best ideas in behavioral science are hidden in plain sight. They’re not flashy. They’re not “innovative.” But they work. Here’s a quick list that could save you from another expensive marketing brainstorm.

If you want someone to value something, don't just give it to them. Make them build it. The IKEA Effect, coined by Michael Norton, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Mochon, describes how people place a higher value on things they help create (Norton, Mochon, and Ariely 2012).

The trouble with intelligence, especially in the corporate imagination, is that it’s been cleaned up to the point of sterility. We assume smart teams must be tidy, rational, and interchangeable. As if intelligence were a kind of disinfectant, rather than a gloriously fermenting mess.

In the 1980s, the Lincoln Memorial was crumbling faster than expected. Marble was flaking off the structure, and the cause wasn’t time or weather, but something far more mundane:

I’ve always suspected that the reason people find it harder to leave a Netflix series than a religious cult is not because of the content, but because they’ve started something and haven’t finished it. Enter the Zeigarnik Effect…

Marketers love rewards. They seem like such a safe bet. Dangle a prize at the end of the rainbow and people will surely behave exactly as you hope. It's neat, logical, and delightfully cheap…in theory.