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Answer extracted from the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast — listen to the full episode below.

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How should creative teams balance the planner's overthinking perspective with what real consumers actually prefer?

20 September 2026 Embracing Marketing Mistakes

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The planner in your head wants to overthink every detail and believe audiences scrutinize ads, but real people simply like what works—they don't analyze the way strategists do. Rather than relying on what planners think consumers should prefer, effective creative teams talk to System One to discover what audiences actually love.

Strategy can become the enemy of effectiveness when planners assume audiences think like they do. Planners exist in a professional bubble where craft, messaging architecture, and rational persuasion matter deeply. But outside that bubble, people respond to things more intuitively—they gravitate toward what feels right, what resonates, what entertains them, without dissecting the reasoning behind their preference.

A powerful illustration of this gap is the meerkat character that has lasted nearly two decades despite not being objectively funny according to conventional humor standards. The meerkat works not because planners predicted it would succeed through rigorous strategic analysis, but because real people genuinely love it. They connect with it on a System One level—the fast, instinctive, emotional system that drives most consumer behavior—rather than a System Two analytical one.

This disconnect matters because as Chris Norton explains in the episode, the opinions that shape what gets celebrated or criticized in advertising—turkey of the week designations, for instance—often come from observers who have never actually made an ad themselves. A critic's professional framework may have nothing to do with what drives real consumer behavior.

The practical solution is to prioritize direct feedback from actual audiences over planner intuition. System One thinking—the subconscious preference system—is where consumers live. Rather than debating whether a creative idea is sophisticated enough or strategically justified enough, teams should test what real people actually respond to. The gap between what planners believe audiences want and what audiences genuinely prefer is where many campaigns miss their mark.

Breaking free from the planner's bias

Overthinking is a professional disease in creative and strategic disciplines. The more you're trained to deconstruct advertising, psychology, and persuasion, the less you think like the people you're trying to reach. Planners spend their days analyzing how ads work, which naturally leads them to assume everyone else does too.

This creates a recurring pattern: creatives and strategists design for themselves rather than for audiences, filtering ideas through a lens of professional rigor that ordinary people never apply. A campaign might be strategically elegant but emotionally inert. It might tick every rational box while failing to land with actual consumers.

To break this cycle, teams need to actively research and listen to System One responses—not rational explanations of why people like something, but the immediate, gut-level preferences people express. That's where the meerkat's two-decade success lives, and the podcast explores how this tension plays out across real campaigns and real mistakes.

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