As a blogger, I try to cover a lot of ground in marketing and marketing data. My posts range from how-tos to POVs to the occasional bit of humor. And then everyone once in a while, I like to go completely “out there” and tackle a marketing issue with a decidedly off-kilter approach. This will be one of those times.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how people shop, both in-store and online, and it’s given me some potential insight into how marketers might be able to develop more appealing experiences for customers.
Behold, Schroedinger’s Cart:
No cats were harmed in the creation of this extremely arduous pun
Physics Nobel Laureate Erwin Schroedinger (or Schrödinger, if you must have the umlaut) famously posited a thought experiment about a cat in a box. Schroedinger asked the reader to imagine that a a random event inside the box would release a poison gas and kill the cat but that the outside observer would have no idea whether that random event occurred. He famously asserted that the cat was both alive and dead until the observer opens the box.
This is ridiculous, of course. Except this thought experiment perfectly describes how we often shop.