Think in bets
In a world where we now get fast, easy and confident answers.
Marketing is about predicting the future. Every brief, every campaign, every media plan is a bet on whether customers are going to buy something, notice something, eventually change their behaviour.
We place bets. We just don’t call them bets.
We should. In a world where we now get fast, easy and confident answers, it is a good habit to learn. Instead of asking if this is right or wrong, the question is more like ‘what kind of bet is this?’
I think in bets. I didn't always but it is a habit for me now.
It’s not about the maths. Mostly. It’s so I can think more clearly without tricking my brain. If you say ‘this is going to work’, you’re committed. 100% committed. And it is hard to find flaws. Now your brain needs it to be right. Consistency and commitment kicks in.
Over time, I’ve trained myself to give the bet a number. Not a precise number, not a spreadsheet number, just something like “I think there’s a 60% chance this might work.” The difference between that sentence and “This will work” is huge, because the second one locks you in and the first one lets you change your mind.
Someone says “I’d put it lower, maybe 40,” and instead of a fight you’ve got a conversation about why. You can disagree with a probability without it feeling personal. Try disagreeing with someone who’s just said “I know this works.” That’s a different meeting.
Not all bets are equal, either. Spending an afternoon testing a new channel is a cheap bet. If it doesn’t work, you’ve lost an afternoon. Committing half your budget to a platform you’ve never used is a different kind of bet entirely, and it deserves a different level of confidence. Some bets are low risk. Some bets are high risk, but maybe worth it.
The language of bets lets you say what’s actually true: this one is low risk and reversible, that one isn’t, and we should probably talk about that before we commit.
Annie Duke wrote a whole book on this, Thinking in Bets. She was a professional poker player. I did a stint in online poker. I wasn’t any good but I was surrounded by smart folks, many of whom had played serious poker. I suspect that poker pros naturally think about everything in bets.
The other thing is that a good decision can still lose and a bad decision can still win. If we only judge our calls by what happened afterwards, we learn nothing useful about whether the thinking was right.
Philip Tetlock found something similar in Super Forecasting. He discovered that the best forecasters weren’t smarter or better informed. They were just less married to being right. They updated when the evidence changed, instead of defending what they’d already said.
He called them foxes.
