When we first started thinking about applying a dog park metaphor to marketing, one thing that became apparent almost immediately was a biggie:  dogs (and all animals, for that matter)  just think different.  Dog logic is not the same as people logic.

The concept of cause and effect, for example, can be quite different from one species to another:

When training a dog, one place where nearly all trainers agree is that you must react to the animal’smost recent action.   If Fido steals a shoe, but drops it when you say to, you should reward the dropping — not punish the stealing.   As a human, it’s often tough (and a test of one’s patience) to remember this.  If the dog were a person, this approach wouldn’t make much sense; human logic says “If I reward the last action, I’m rewarding all the actions leading up to it.  They’ll think that shoe stealing equals reward.”

This understanding brings up two key things that we’ve had to keep in mind:

1. Don’t take dog park lessons too literally.  There needs to be some interpretation of the dogs’ behaviour.

and

2. There’s a marketing lesson to be learned in this very observation…

It’s a basic lesson and something that every marketer should learn their first day on the job or in school:

Your customers are not you.

Even if you are a consumer of your product or service, you are not a typical customer.  They think differently than you — customer logic is not the same as marketer logic.

Yet this is perhaps the most common business mistake around.  How many business people do things because they “just make sense”?  How many make a decision based solely on their own experiences and desires?  How many are shocked, surprised, and confused when a business decision doesn’t bring the expected results?

I’d wager that every single marketer has made the assumption that their customers will behave just like them (or follow the same logic as them) at least a few times during their career.

Even for the simplest, most seemingly obvious task, choice, or idea, it’s vital that we avoid this assumption.  That doesn’t mean you have to hold a focus group every time you want to restock a shelf or change a line of copywriting.  But there needs to be at least a millisecond’s pause to consider “Will my customers and/or prospects really do what I expect?”