Input Bias and How to Compete When the Best Marketer Is AI, What We Know From Psychology

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In his book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman predicts that AI will be able to successfully build a business in a few years. You would just need to write a prompt like, “Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.”

How?

Well, Suleyman says, AI could research trends online, find what sells on Amazon, generate images of products, and send them to manufacturers on Alibaba.

AI could then “email back and forth to refine the requirements … and continually update marketing materials and product designs based on buyer feedback,” Suleyman writes.

In other words, it’ll make my job in marketing (and most roles in business) irrelevant. This leaves those of us who work at companies big and small in crisis. What will we do? Why would businesses need marketers if an AI can make $1 million on Amazon without human assistance?

Soon, I’d become like the London gaslighters of the 1800s or the doormen of the 1900s — unnecessary and redundant. Except, I think there is a get-out-of-jail-free card. I think there is a way for me to remain relevant in a world where the best marketer is an AI.

Looking to Stay Relevant? Leverage Input Bias

So, what’s the secret to staying relevant? To explain, I need to introduce a well-documented psychological phenomenon: input bias.

Input bias suggests that customers prefer products and services that require a lot of effort, money, or time to create. Nancy Harhut describes this bias neatly in her book Using Behavioural Science in Marketing.

She writes, “The amount of input becomes a proxy for the resulting quality. While in some cases, there is a direct relationship between how much time and energy is put into a project, in other cases there is not. Yet, people are not always good at discerning the difference. As a result, they can automatically assume more effort equals better output.”

For example, suppose I’m told that my favorite restaurant is staffed by an Italian family with 80 years of experience. In that case, I’ll rate their pizza more favorably than the exact same pizza created by a machine in a German factory.

This is input bias at play. We all prefer products or services that require effort and experience. That’s why we love to hear or read about the hard work that powers our favorite brands.

Studies on factory tours prove this. The paper “Pulling back the curtain” found that purchase intent increased by 60% after a customer saw behind the scenes.

We value our own efforts as well. Two University of Oxford scientists discovered that opening wine with a cork top boosts its flavor by 4%. When participants were told the wine was cork top but didn’t open it themselves, this perceived quality and flavor boost disappeared.

I even ran my own experiment to see if I could harness the benefits of input bias.

I host Nudge, the UK’s top marketing podcast. Over 350,000 marketers have tuned into my show to learn from my guests, garnering 482 five-star reviews. Sharing the effort that I put into my podcast made my Reddit ad 45% more effective than the control.

The takeaway for marketers? You need to show how much human effort has gone into your offerings.

Showcase how many engineers worked on your product. Tout the years your team has spent developing your craft. Potential buyers need to know that you’re creating something high-quality that can outperform quick solutions like AI.

How Marketers Beat AI

Before I close out this post, I want to pivot back to the bots. Facebook has developed an AI that’s smart enough to manipulate and persuade humans. It’s called Cicero.

Cicero was built by Meta to play a complex board game called Diplomacy. A mix of Risk and poker, this game involves planning complex strategies, where backstabbing and deception are vital.

It’s easy to see how bots designed to manipulate human emotion can create appealing ads and compelling pitches for new products.

What makes humans different? It’s effort.

Consumers will still prefer products and services with greater input levels. The CRM prospect will prefer a sales deck created by a hard-working saleswoman over an identical pitch delivered by a human-quality AI.

The Instagram scroller will appreciate the artwork of a Mexican sculptor who documents each stage of her process over the same piece of art created by an LLM.

The solution to this marketing crisis is reassuringly simple.

Display the hard work put into the service. Highlight the hours devoted to its creation. Take the time to create campaigns, advertisements, emails, or content packed with effort. Your customers can see how much you, as a marketer, truly and deeply care.

In the future, there will be more supercharged AI offerings like Cicero that we’ll have to compete against. Input bias is one essential tactic to stay ahead of technology and future-proof our jobs in a world where AI can make millions fast.