Walk into any business school lecture, finance meeting, or corporate strategy session, and you’ll hear echoes of a grand delusion: that business is a plan, perfectly rational, operating in an environment of perfect information and perfect trust. This fantasy crafted by neoclassical economics and taught as gospel in MBA programs is as elegant as it is misleading.
As someone who operates on the frontlines of consumer behavior, brand narratives, and the emotional pulse of culture, let me say this clearly:
- Marketing doesn’t live in that fantasy. It lives in the mess.
- And if you’re in advertising, branding, or communications you know exactly what I mean.
The Education Trap: Where Rationality Goes to Die
Neoclassical economics teaches us that individuals are rational actors, markets are efficient, and that supply and demand magically reach equilibrium. It’s tidy. It’s mathematical. It’s seductively logical.
But it’s also wrong.
Humans aren’t rational we’re impulsive, emotional, tribal, distracted, and driven by desires we can’t even name. That’s not an insult. That’s reality. Yet business schools continue to churn out strategists trained to treat people as numbers on a spreadsheet hyper-rational agents with perfect foresight and unshakable trust in the system.
The result? Marketing plans that look brilliant on paper and die on the shelf.
The Dangerous Impact on Business Strategy
When executives trained in this worldview oversee marketing, they expect the market to behave like a formula.
- Launch product.
- Optimize funnel.
- Watch sales soar.
They demand perfect attribution, linear ROI, and forecasts that assume tomorrow will look like yesterday. But marketing isn’t physics. It’s psychology. It’s culture. It’s alchemy.
You don’t sell ideas with logic. You sell them with emotion.
You don’t build trust with efficiency. You build it with storytelling.
You don’t create movements through data. You spark them with meaning.
The Psychic’s View: What the Market Actually Is
As a marketing psychic, I don’t mean I read minds I read patterns, sentiments, vibes, and culture. I look where the numbers don’t. I listen to what people feel, not just what they say. And here’s the truth that classical economics can’t compute:
- People don’t buy products they buy beliefs.
- They buy identity. They buy belonging. They buy stories that make them feel seen, heard, and understood. The market isn’t a machine it’s a living organism of fear, hope, envy, love, and dreams.
We Need a New Economic Imagination
It’s time for business schools and boardrooms to retire the delusion of the “rational actor” and embrace the complexity of human behavior. That means:
- Teaching behavioral economics, cultural anthropology, and storytelling.
- Valuing intuition, not just analysis.
- Accepting ambiguity as part of the process not a flaw in the system.
- Replacing sterile models with empathy, symbolism, and emotional intelligence.
If you want your marketing to work in the real world, you need to think more like a poet and less like a banker.
Final Word from the Psychic
Neoclassical economics may still rule the ivory towers and investor decks but in the trenches of marketing, we know better. We work with half-truths, gut feelings, and unfinished stories. We sell to hearts, not just heads.
So let the economists keep their fantasies of perfect trust and perfect information.
We’ll be over here, building brands that make people feel something.
