As marketers, we often make a lot of assumptions about what people want and how they'll behave when presented with certain information. Occasionally, we have a study or two to backup our hunches but often we rely on gut instinct and a few insights glean from the collective wisdom of our peers to get us over the line. Usually it's enough. But what if you were able to go beyond the general consensus, the conventional wisdom and access hard data about what works and what doesn't? Unfortunately, it's rare that someone takes a systematic approach to uncovering the underlying principles that drive human behavior and decision making and applies them to marketing. For the last 25 years, that's exactly what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin has been doing through his brands MECLABS, Marketingexperiments.com and Marketing Sherpa. Flint has been using the web as his testing ground in conducting behavioral experiments and real world situations to gain data on human decision making. What has emerged from Flint's research is a replica method of offer response optimization and messaging that could change the way you think about marketing. On this episode number 203 of Marketing Speak, Dr. McGlaughlin joins me to talk about the blind spots of the marketing industry, how we can drop the buzzwords and create more authentic messaging that resonates with our audience, and various other pearls of wisdom from his book, The Marketer as Philosopher. Stay tuned for an episode that will take you beyond focus groups and shallow insights into profound philosophical questions about human behavior that will help you transcend the current marketing paradigm.