Say the Color, Not the Word: The Test Your Marketing Assumptions Keep Failing

Try this exercise. Someone shows you a row of color patches and asks you to call out each color as fast as you can. Red, blue, green, yellow. Easy.

Now they show you words printed in ink. The word is "blue," but it's printed in red. You're asked to say the color of the ink, not read the word.

You stumble. Almost everyone does. Your brain reads the word before you've decided to read anything, and the right answer has to fight its way past the wrong one. Psychologist John Ridley Stroop described the effect in 1935, and it has held up ever since.

The lesson isn't that people are bad at colors. It's that the brain answers first and asks questions never, unless you slow it down on purpose.

Marketing is full of words printed in the wrong color

Every marketer carries a set of automatic answers. Billboards build the brand. Email is dead. Organic search takes too long. Google Ads is too expensive now. Our customers don't use AI.

Some of these were true once. Some are half true. Some were never true for your market. The problem is the same in each case: the answer fires before anyone looks at what's in front of them. It feels like experience, and it feels like common sense. It's the brain reading the word instead of naming the color.

Fast decisions made on stale assumptions are expensive, because they don't feel like mistakes while you're making them. They feel like confidence.

How to override it

The fix is the same as in the exercise. Slow down, and answer the question that was actually asked.

First, name the assumption out loud. "We believe email doesn't work for our customers" is a testable statement. Left unspoken, it's just the way things are done here.

Second, look at what's actually there. Search term reports, conversion paths, call logs, quote requests, and sales records say what buyers did, which is different from what anyone expects them to do.

Third, decide from that, then test it. If the data agrees with the assumption, you've lost nothing. If it doesn't, you've just avoided an expensive year.

None of this is slow in practice. It takes an afternoon. The slow part is being willing to find out the first answer was wrong.

Three plays for right now

Check what buyers are actually searching before you retool your message. Tariffs are changing how many buyers shop, and it's tempting to assume they're all looking for Canadian-made alternatives. Some are. Pull your search term reports and see the exact phrases people are typing, then build around those. Assumptions about what the market wants right now are the fastest to go stale.

List your top three marketing beliefs and attach a number to each. Write down the three things your team treats as settled, whether that's a channel that works, a channel that doesn't, or a customer who buys a certain way. Then find the metric that proves or disproves each one. If you can't find one, you've located an assumption running on autopilot.

Ask the AI assistants about your business and read what they say. Buyers are asking these tools who to call. Don't assume you show up, or that what they say about you is accurate. Ask them the questions your customers would ask, read the answers, and fix the pages and facts they're drawing from.

Your brain will keep giving you the fast answer. Your job is to notice when it does.

Which assumption in your marketing is answering before you've looked at the data?

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