Why Marketers Fail to Understand Their Customers: The False Consensus Effect

Marketing is all about understanding customer preferences and providing solutions that match these preferences. However, marketers’ perceptions of their target customers’ preferences can be biased. We show that one of the most important biases in this category is the so-called false consensus effect (FCE)¾that is, marketers tend to project their personal preferences onto customers.1 Notably, we find that even highly trained marketing professionals are susceptible to the FCE and tend to confuse their personal preferences with the preferences of target customers. Overall, we conducted six studies with 714 marketing executives to investigate the FCE in detail.