Marketing BS: Contra Expertise
As a special year-end bonus, here is this week’s featured Marketing BS essay. Paid subscribers can look forward to tomorrow’s Weekly Briefing, which expands on this essay and also highlights what was important to know in the last week.
Marketing BS will take a quick break until December 30, when I will share a podcast interview with Joe Megibow, CEO of Purple.
In the meantime, have a happy holiday!
—Edward
Experience and expertise
Back in May 2020, I wrote an essay titled “Experience and Progressions.” The general thesis: countries that were impacted by previous pandemics (SARS, MERS, etc.) were much better at containing COVID-19 than regions without a recent history of viral outbreaks. Additionally, some “less developed” countries that endured previous pandemics were better equipped to manage the coronavirus crisis than more “advanced” nations.
Despite the richer countries’ superior financial resources and healthcare infrastructure, they were missing the visceral, real-life experience of pandemics. In contrast, governments with previous pandemic experience — even the ones from less developed nations — were able to understand and implement some of the most effective ways to stop the spread of COVID.
In that essay, I explored how even a seemingly straightforward task — like building some basement stairs — contains multitudes of specific details that are almost impossible to explain. The details must be learned by doing.
The following excerpt combines quotes from AI researcher John Salvatier and my own commentary:
“Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance.
The first thing you’ll notice is that there are actually quite a few subtasks.”
He lists some of those tasks: cutting both ends of the 2x12s at the correct angles, screwing u-brackets to the main floor, screwing the 2x12s into the u-brackets, attaching the angle brackets, and screwing in the stairs.
Of course, installing a staircase involves more steps (pun intended…). Salvatier explains that each of those tasks requires the completion of multiple subtasks, many of which include specific tools and tricky techniques:
“The first problem you’ll encounter is that cutting your 2x12s to the right angle is a bit complicated because there’s no obvious way to trace the correct angles. You can either get creative (there IS a way to trace it), or you can bust out your trig book and figure out how to calculate the angle and position of the cuts.”
[Salvatier goes into greater detail to describe several of the subtasks (and sub-subtasks)]
“At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences.”
The important point here: there is no replacement for experience.
When you need someone to perform a marketing activity for your team, you would benefit from hiring someone with previous experience undertaking that precise task. And ideally, you want someone who, in addition to having that marketing experience, is smart at learning new things and applying their skills to novel situations.
But there’s a common problem: for any given pay level, there is a trade-off between experience and intelligence.
COVID incompetence
Last week, Patrick Collison — the CEO of fintech platform Stripe — posted a provocative Twitter thread about COVID (mis)information:
In February, many expert sources (e.g., WHO, CDC, and the mainstream media) communicated the message that COVID was nothing to worry about. Many sources repeated the false notion that “COVID is no worse than the standard flu.”
One specific piece of expert advice has aged very badly: wearing masks was not only useless, but it was potentially harmful! The logic (at the time): “people do not know how to wear and remove masks properly, so they will end up spreading germs and increasing the chances of infecting themselves and others.”
When a number of Silicon Valley companies shut down their offices, critics said they were overreacting. Here’s how Real Clear Politics — way back in a March 27, 2020 article — summarized the early media coverage of the coronavirus.
On Feb. 7, The Daily Beast was saying, “Coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat.” As late as March 4, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was telling viewers, “So if you’re freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu.”
You could argue that the media was not responsible for their naivety; after all, they were just listening to recognized experts like WHO. But WHO has been wrong over and over again this year. In June, Nabeel Qureshi (who works on biomedical software for Palantir) compiled some of WHO’s biggest misses:
Qureshi went on to question the validity of expertise:
We live in a world where non-expert superforecasters can provably outperform panels of experts from the best universities. This is not theoretical anymore.
Matthew Yglesias (the co-founder and former editor of Vox, now a full-time Substack journalist) echoed Qureshi’s perspectives about expertise:
To me, one of the big takeaways from this pandemic has been that in a genuinely novel situation where you need to make decisions based on imperfect evidence, listening to smart generalists has been more useful than listening to credentialed subject matter experts.
Intelligence versus experience
Hindsight is 2020 (pun intended). We know that WHO, CDC, and other experts made many questionable — or flat-out wrong — pronouncements this year. Alarmingly, though, the experts do not appear to have learned their lessons; there are more wrong-headed decisions on the horizon.
Consider the COVID vaccine. The US government is facing limited supplies, logistic challenges, and public pressures. As such, they are developing plans to prioritize distribution of the vaccine. CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices developed research models to determine which demographic groups should be vaccinated with the highest levels of urgency. The report assumed that medical professionals should receive the first vaccines. CDC identified three possible groups for the next priority level:
essential workers
adults with high-risk conditions
seniors over the age of 65
At first glance, the answer is not obvious: should we vaccinate the people most at risk, or the people most likely to spread the virus? The CDC report predicted some possible outcomes:
If you want to minimize deaths, you should prioritize the vaccination of seniors.
Vaccinating essential workers first would result in TWICE the total number of deaths.
CDC also considered “ease of implementation.” Again, seniors came out on top.
And yet, CDC concluded that we should vaccinate essential workers BEFORE senior citizens.
Why? In addition to “deaths,” CDC also considered “ethics.” We know that racial and ethnic populations are overrepresented in the ranks of essential workers and underrepresented in the cohort of seniors over 65. As a matter of equity, therefore, CDC believes that essential workers should move to the front of the queue.
This is a classic example of prioritizing symbolic values over actual facts. Suppose CDC’s absolute top priority was “saving the highest possible number of lives from racial and ethnic populations” — even in that case, their own analysis STILL indicates that vaccinating seniors first would be the best way to achieve their priority goal.
But this failure in CDC’s decision-making process might not even be the result of an ethical dilemma. Instead, CDC appears to have based their conclusions on bad analysis. In the report, the different options for vaccine prioritization were evaluated on the basis of multiple factors; for each category, the different plans received a “star rating” out of three. For the category of “total deaths,” the models for “seniors first” and “essential workers first” both received the exact same 3-star rating — despite the 2x difference in deaths.
How should we begin to understand CDC’s decisions? In the staircase-building example I mentioned at the beginning of today’s essay, many details can only be learned through experience.
The problem might be that epidemiologists, as a group, possess the right experience to determine public health policy, but they do not have a monopoly on intelligence. I am not suggesting that epidemiologists are dumb by any stretch — 100% of them hold advanced degrees. (And while degrees are more about credentialism than intelligence, it takes SOME intelligence to jump through the hoops that academia puts in front of students).
The average GRE scores — across all test takers — usually fall somewhere between 150 to 152. The University of Maryland offers a well-regarded Public Health program. The average GRE score of its entrants? 151. When it comes to graduate students, epidemiologists are —from an intelligence perspective — decidedly average.
While experience is extremely important when building a new set of stairs, sometimes IQ is more important than experience. Perhaps Matthew Yglesias is correct in speculating that the unprecedented scale of the COVID crisis could be better managed by “smart generalists” rather than “credentialed subject matter experts.”
(Update: after writing this essay, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices revised their priority sequence for the COVID vaccine. Instead of starting with essential workers, the new plan prioritizes seniors 75+ and the most exposed workers, followed by seniors 65+, other essential workers, and people with co-morbidities.)
The IQ/experience tradeoff
When you hire for an entry-level role, you’re (usually) selecting someone without any relevant experience. In different fields, entry-level roles earn varying salaries (e.g., McKinsey pays more than P&G, which pays more than Walmart). If you shift the pay up or down for an entry-level role, you are not paying for more experience — you are paying for more IQ, EQ, drive, conscientiousness, and all the other stuff we bundle together as “intelligence.”
When you hire for NON-entry level roles, you often have more leeway in terms of the salary you can offer and the type of candidate you select. Essentially, you need to make a choice between candidates with more experience or greater intelligence.
You end up with a choice chart (or “cost curve”) that looks something like this:
Each red line on the chart represents a compensation level. For any given salary, you can recruit a candidate with some combination of “more experience” or “greater intelligence.”
Of course, every employer wants to hire someone with both experience and intelligence! But if you want a candidate who is very experienced in a field (say marketing) AND very intelligent, then they would likely demand a salary that exceeds what you can offer.
Here’s a practical example: imagine that (1) you plan to hire an email marketing manager, and (2) you were given a maximum salary to offer to the best candidate. Now you have a decision to make: do you hire someone with a lot of experience managing email campaigns, or do you hire someone with limited (or no) experience managing the task? The former looks better on paper (and meets your listed job requirements like “2–4 years of experience”). BUT, by paying someone with four years of email marketing experience, you need to wonder, “why is this person not a SENIOR manager or DIRECTOR of email marketing by now?”
Management thinker Laurence Peter is famous for the idea that “people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence.” Although the “Peter Principle” was first intended in a satirical way, many businesspeople have come to believe (based on research) in the accuracy of the concept.
The idea is simple:
When a person is competent at their job, they are often promoted.
When a person moves into a new role that requires new skills, the person might NEVER develop the required competence to succeed.
Over time, everyone in the company will reach a position where they lack the required competence to succeed.
Some companies attempt to counter the Peter Principle with “up or out” promotion strategies. Other ways to deal with the Peter Principle include greater caution about who is hired, as well as a willingness to fire (or demote) people who lack the required skills for the position.
Still, many companies fall prey to some version of the Peter Principle.
When you hire someone with extensive experience, you run the risk of importing the other company’s Peter Principle problem into your own organization.
Smarts and marketing
In practice, there are diminishing returns to both experience and intelligence. When my friend was building his direct-to-consumer beef business, he needed to hire butchers. His top requirement for the job was obvious: “experience as a butcher.” Without previous butchering experience, even the smartest candidate in the world would not be a good fit for the role. (Even the very idea of recruiting “candidates” for a butcher position seems nonsensical. In reality, my friend went out and looked for experienced butchers, and then he contracted them for the work he needed done).
I don’t need the smartest hairdresser or Uber driver or tailor. I’m not suggesting that intelligence is completely irrelevant for those jobs — there are always benefits to having intelligence, especially when dealing with atypical problems. For example, a smart Uber driver could probably handle an out-of-the-ordinary situation (like a presidential motorcade) more effectively than a less intelligent driver. But for regular Uber rides, driving experience is usually more valuable than natural intelligence.
There are, of course, some jobs where intelligence DOES matter a considerable amount. I expect that “being smart” would improve the competence of people working as lawyers, accountants, and dentists. That said, experience still matters for these occupations. If you needed one of those people for an important problem, who would you rather hire: a very intelligent novice or a slightly less-intelligent person with a dozen years of experience?
But in the “business” world — especially in marketing — things are very different.
Ryan Wallman (Creative Director at Wellmark Health) asked Mark Ritson (Marketing Professor and Marketing Week Columnist), if marketers should study marketing. Here is Ritson’s reply:
Ritson is not wrong. Being trained in marketing should make you a better marketer, just as being trained in dentistry will make you a better dentist. But the difference between dentistry and marketing is one of consistency. Much of dentistry is repetitive. (Maybe too repetitive, actually. Dentists have a shockingly high suicide rate).
Experience is incredibly valuable when you are repeating the same types of experiences. Chopping up the next cow is very, very similar to butchering the last 100 cows.
But for problems that involve complex variables and rapidly changing circumstances, then intelligence is more important than experience. Figuring out what will work on the next marketing campaign is not just a copy-and-paste exercise from the previous 100 campaigns.
To be clear, I believe that marketing experience (or training) IS valuable. But I’m arguing that the relative value of experience over intelligence is not as valuable in marketing as in many other professional occupations (dentistry, accounting, law) or service roles (hairdressing, Uber driving, butchering).
Experience matters.
Intelligence matters.
But you need to understand how much each of those two attributes matters for any given role, and then consider what trade-offs you are willing to make. Don’t assume you can get “everything you want,” because you can’t. And if you are not making the conscious decision about what trade-offs you are making, it does not mean the trade-offs are not happening — it just means that you are not fully conscious of how the decisions are being made.
Keep it simple,
Edward
Edward Nevraumont is a Senior Advisor with Warburg Pincus. The former CMO of General Assembly and A Place for Mom, Edward previously worked at Expedia and McKinsey & Company. For more information, including details about his latest book, check out Marketing BS.