The Nirvana Fallacy: How to Turn it into a Marketing Advantage

From The Desk Of Marketing Mastery

As the great French writer Voltaire once said, perfect is the enemy of good. And yet, we still strive for perfection all the time. From self improvement to job hunting and even to dating, seeking perfection is deeply ingrained in human desire and behavior. People tend to have unrealistic expectations of existing things. We compare them to unrealistic, perfect counterparts. It's called the Nirvana fallacy. Not after the band, of course, but after the Buddhist term for perfection. In 1969, economist Harold Demsetz was disenchanted by government policy makers always presenting choices between ideal scenarios and existing arrangements. He described it as "nirvana approach." It's the same in any other part of life. You look at your newly designed landing page, and it's good—but you want it to be perfect, even if it's driving good conversions. In marketing, your audience often approaches products with the same Nirvana mindset. Yes, your product is good. But it's not perfect. And even if you present it as such, you can't outcompete whatever ideal a customer may have in their head. So how do you overcome and even leverage the Nirvana mindset? Three ways you can leverage the Nirvana fallacy in your marketing 1) Go the "close to perfection" route Can you please a perfectionist? Not really. Nor can you convince them your product is perfect—they will always compare it to something unrealistic. But you can challenge their Nirvana bias by taking the "nothing is perfect but your product is darn close" route. Take a perfect scenario that no product can achieve, and position yourself as getting close. 2) Shift the "perfection" focus What if your audience can achieve perfection, but is seeking it in the wrong place? You can divert their focus from searching for the ideal solution to providing a different solution that solves the same problem. 3) Showcase incremental improvements Remember the Voltaire quote we mentioned earlier? The Nirvana fallacy prevents us from evaluating the final product because we tend to look for perfection. The solution is to show continuous, incremental improvements rather than the end result. The end result will never be good enough. But everybody loves being a part of the journey.

Thank you for taking the time to read this insight. Marketing Mastery

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