Forget Rationality. Evolution Built the Consumer.

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. Obsessed with rationality, allergic to uncertainty, and utterly confused by real people (and how they actually act in the real world). And yet, decade after decade, marketers keep dragging their campaigns toward models designed to explain wheat futures and interest rates.

Even behavioral economics, for all its clever nudges and salience traps, still works inside the same box. It patches the old model, rather than replacing it.

Marketing doesn’t operate according to stable, predictable rules...like economic models built on equilibrium (where supply meets demand, markets clear, and everything balances neatly). Instead, marketing deals with unpredictable, messy human behavior: shifting tastes, irrational preferences, social influence, mimicry, identity, emotion. It’s a function of chaos, imitation, story, and survival. And the best explanations for those don’t come from the trading floor. They come from the forest floor.

The consumer isn’t a rational actor. They are an animal. A social one. Pattern-seeking. Status-sensitive. Built for reciprocity, alliance, display, and deception. They don't buy toothpaste. They buys signals; about mating value, group identity, risk tolerance, and sometimes just plain old dopamine.

And if you want to predict what they’ll do next, don’t look to spreadsheets. Look to selective pressure. That’s where the instincts are. That’s where the heuristics live.

Marketers need a new lens. One built from complexity, not equilibrium. One that understands mimicry, loops, tipping points, and the evolutionary usefulness of habits, tastes, and even bad decisions. Especially bad decisions.

We should stop asking why people should want something. Instead, ask what problem it used to solve on the savannah. Ask what unconscious pattern it matches. Ask what kind of brain it flatters (or threatens).

You will find these answers if you think like a biologist with a sense of humor.

Marketing works when it taps into instincts shaped before modern life existed. Because those instincts are ingrained, and are not going anywhere. Attention, trust, appetite, and fear still follow ancient rules. That tension creates patterns. The best ideas start there.

Linear graphs and mental accounting can’t explain why someone buys ten identical shirts or chooses a car based on its grill. Consumer behavior follows older rules. Evolutionary ones. If something feels irrational, pay attention. That’s instinct at work.