Product Marketing’s Uncertainty Principle

4 min readJan 23, 2017

*Note: Although the article’s picture is of the famous Solvay Conference, it’s uncertain whether Heisenberg was actually in the picture.

“The only thing standing between your product and your product’s goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why the market hasn’t embraced it”

As marketers, it’s our job to show people what they want.

Steve Jobs once explained it’s not their job to know what they want.

So what we all naturally do is go out into the market, ask questions, do focus groups, and mold a plan from that.

Three words, eight letters-

It’s a trap.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg published a paper which presented his Uncertainty Principle.

*Cartoon by John Richardson for Physics World, March 1998*

It explained that the more precisely the position of a mass is determined, the less precisely the momentum (direction) is known in this instant, and vice versa.

That means you can measure either the frequency (velocity) or the position of an object, but you can never measure both at the same time with absolute accuracy or certainty.

Simply put; when you measure something you change it.

Thus, it’s not as accurate as you think.

That’s Not What I Really Meant ……

In the sharp formulation of the law of causality — “if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future”-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise. — Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927

The Pedowitz Group, a marketing agency headquartered in Atlanta, defines the marketing effect of the Uncertainty Principle this way:

You can measure what consumers will say they’re going to do, or you can measure what they actually do.
No matter how closely you try to measure what they say they intend to do — such as with surveys or focus groups — it will differ from what they ultimately do.
Precision in measuring stated intentions doesn’t bring you closer to insight on predicting behavior.

When Google asks people what they search for, they give a variety of answers. However, when the data was referenced it turns out they listed everything except the number one most searched keyword; porn.

Everyone says they never eat at McDonalds because it’s unhealthy.

Despite all of the anti-fast food campaigns warning of the health hazards, McDonald’s sales are still high.

People will often tell you what they think you want to hear, as opposed to what they really think.

Marketers should then never listen to what they say, but observe what their actions are.

On the Creep

I believe that the existence of the classical “path” can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it. — Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927

Heisenberg himself said that a key to the Uncertainty Principle was that just merely observing the actions of subatomic particles influenced their actions.

This idea, called the “observer effect,” frequently gets conflated with the Uncertainty Principle, but it, too, has a marketing effect.

An article published by the marketing technology firm Synaxis provides a hypothetical example:

If you ask your customers if they would buy, say, a waterproof flashlight, the question itself will influence them to say yes.

They’ll think of all the reasons why such a flashlight would come in handy.

Yet none of them started out with a desire for a waterproof flashlight, and when they go to buy a flashlight in the future, “waterproof” will still not be on their list of must-have features.

Observing their behavior (aka asking questions) changed their behavior in the giving of the answers.