Right, so there I was with Mel from Upp B2B, attempting to explain why perfectly rational marketing strategies keep bumping into gloriously irrational humans who insist on making buying decisions based on whether they like the font on your website.

(Spoiler alert: Comic Sans remains inexplicably polarizing in B2B circles.)

Twenty minutes of untangling the delicious contradiction at the heart of marketing automation—we’ve built these magnificent, logical systems to predict human behavior, and humans respond by doing exactly what spreadsheets say they shouldn’t. Like training a very sophisticated robot to understand why someone bought enterprise software because the salesperson reminded them of their favorite uncle.

Behavioral economics meets marketing reality, seasoned with just enough theory to make your MBA professor nod approvingly while keeping it practical enough for actual humans with actual budgets and actual bosses asking why the leads aren’t converting.

This was a podcast episode I recorded on B2B marketing with the agency Upp B2B.