Down Marketing's Cave
The comfort of conforming to convenient lies
Two thousand years ago, Plato described prisoners chained inside a cave, watching shadows flicker on a wall. The shadows were cast by real objects. The light was real. Their error was simpler and more devastating than ignorance. They believed that what they could observe was all there was to know.
“To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
Marketing has built the most sophisticated cave in commercial history.
We watch the digital shadow of the customer with extraordinary precision. We track what they click, where they pause, what they abandon, and we feed all of it into models sophisticated enough to predict next month’s purchase but not next year’s need. The output gets called insight. Entire strategies are built on the assumption that it is.
But we are not watching people. We are watching behaviour. And behaviour is a shadow of something deeper, something a person can’t name in a focus group because it doesn’t have a name yet.
Henry Ford understood this over a century ago. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” He wasn’t being arrogant. He was describing the walls of the cave. People can only request what they’ve already seen.
This is not a new error. For centuries, physiognomy promised that studying the human face with sufficient care would reveal character and destiny. The measurements were meticulous and the conclusions were nonsense, which is the most dangerous combination in any discipline. Digital marketing has built its own physiognomy. We study the behavioural surface of the customer with extraordinary fidelity, and we confuse the resolution of the image for the depth of the understanding.
When you build strategy from shadows, you build for the category, not for yourself. Nobody wakes up wanting your brand. They wake up with a need that belongs to the market. And because the shadows are shared, every competitor watching the same data sees the same patterns, runs the same models, and arrives at the same conclusions. The result is work that is precise in its targeting and identical in its output. Nobody remembers it because there is nothing to remember. Data can only show you what already exists.
AI has industrialised the process. It can now produce analysis with the shape and texture of strategic thinking, at a speed that makes actual thinking feel like an indulgence rather than a requirement. The output is pattern recognition performed on the recent past and projected forward. It cannot imagine what isn’t there. It can only describe the cave wall in higher resolution.
Oatly didn’t study what milk drinkers wanted. They asked why milk was the assumption. That is the difference between observing the shadows and questioning the wall. Products and experiences must anticipate, not reflect. But you cannot anticipate from the point of behaviour. Behaviour is yesterday’s answer to yesterday’s question. You can only anticipate from the point of need, and need is the one thing the instruments cannot capture.
That is what strategy is for. Not to describe the market as it is, but to see what it could become. Conviction, not observation. The few who build something that lasts are the ones willing to walk out of the cave.
But Plato’s story has a harder ending than most people remember. When a prisoner finally broke free and saw the world as it was, the light was so overwhelming he wanted to crawl back into the dark. And when he returned to tell the others what he’d seen, they thought he’d gone mad.
They preferred the shadows. The shadows were familiar. The shadows looked like knowledge.
Most of the industry still does.