# Why Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM *Your buyers aren't evaluating vendors. They're validating a choice they already made.* **Written by JD Prater — 3x VP of Marketing.** This piece is part of *Open Folders*, which sits at the intersection of marketing science, consulting research, and practitioner experience, opening the parts of the discipline most marketers never got taught, so they can lead the whole of it, not just the slice they came up in. Newsletter: https://jdprater.substack.com Website: https://jdprater.com Original post: https://jdprater.substack.com/p/why-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-buying Ask people why they bought something and they'll usually give you a clean answer. The price was right. The product looked better. A friend recommended it. The timing worked. The brand felt more trustworthy. Sometimes those answers are true. They're rarely the whole story. I've sat in enough debriefs to know the story buyers tell afterward is usually cleaner than the decision they made in the moment. At one company, we sold speech-to-text software. We had a white website. Our biggest competitor had a dark one. I remember hearing buyers say, plainly, that they preferred us because our site felt lighter. Easier. More familiar. That wasn't the whole decision. We still had to win on product, model quality, and pricing. But it was a useful reminder that small cues, comfort, and familiarity were already shaping the field before any explicit comparison began. Kahneman's most useful line for marketers isn't just that one system is fast and the other is slow. It's that most of what we experience as thinking is the fast system doing the work while the slower system takes the credit. System 1 is the impulsive CEO, making split-second calls on pattern recognition and familiarity. The white website? Familiar. Let's go with them. System 2 is the PR rep who shows up afterward to write the press release that makes the decision sound strategic. The buyer did use reason. Features mattered. Pricing got scrutinized. But the PR rep is always cleaning up after a call that was already made. That doesn't mean people never reason. It means the explanation usually arrives after the choice is already made. --- ## Buying is probabilistic The model behind most marketing budgets is a vending machine. Put spend into a channel. Buyers come out the other end. Adjust the dial until the ratio improves. The dashboard exists to confirm the mechanism is working. It's comfortable because it fits in a spreadsheet. Buying doesn't work that way. The patterns in purchase data have been consistent for decades. Purchase frequency varies smoothly across buyers. Not in spikes around the most loyal segment. Buyers of one brand regularly buy competing brands too, in proportions that track market size more than loyalty. Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow documented these patterns exhaustively. Buying isn't random. But it's probabilistic. Shaped more by context, availability, and salience than by deliberate optimization. Once you accept that, the question changes. It's no longer only which lever produced the conversion. It's whether the brand is present and easy to retrieve when the conditions for a purchase arrive. Most of those conditions are outside your control. The buyer is ready when they're ready. The brand that's familiar when that moment comes starts with an advantage the dashboard won't credit. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." That phrase is usually read as career risk management: choose the established name, and if it fails, you chose what everyone else chose. There are two sides to it. The first is getting on the shortlist. Most buyers enter formal evaluation with a list of vendors they've already decided to consider. Bain and Google put the B2B figure at 86%. WPP's research on purchase behavior more broadly lands at 84%. The shortlist is nearly always where it ends. The same Bain and Google research, across 1,208 US B2B buyers, found 92% ultimately purchased from their Day One List. Sales Benchmark Index analysis of 27,000+ complex deals puts that figure at 90%. The list tends to close before sales gets involved. Forrester's buyer journey research found that 62% of decision-makers finalize the shortlist without ever speaking to sales. And 72% of buyers start their journey by asking peers, not vendors — Wynter's 2025 C-suite Buyer Journey Study. The shortlist forms in conversations marketing often isn't part of. Getting there is the probabilistic side of what marketing does. Consistent presence, familiarity built over time, social proof that others chose this vendor and it worked. These are the activities that shift the probability of a brand being retrieved when a buyer is ready to look. The shortlist isn't formed during the evaluation. It forms during all the time before it. The second side is that the shortlist is safe. Once a brand is in the set, familiarity does different work. It lowers perceived risk. It makes the choice feel defensible. Byron Sharp's research shows why this compounds: larger brands have more buyers who buy them more often, which means more familiarity, which means more buyers. The loop runs on both sides of the decision. Getting on the shortlist is the probabilistic marketing problem. Being the safe choice is what familiarity earns once you're there. The career protection story is what buyers say afterward. --- ## Decisions are threshold crossings A buyer can see value and still do nothing. They can understand the message, agree with the positioning, even say they intend to act, and still never move. That gap between "sounds good" and "I'll do it" is where a lot of marketing gets lost. A more useful model treats choice as a threshold crossing. People act when the conditions for action become strong enough. Not just when a product looks attractive, but when it feels worth the effort, credible enough, timely enough, safe enough, and relevant enough to move. That threshold isn't fixed. It shifts with risk, uncertainty, time pressure, effort, familiarity, trust, and how easy the option is to retrieve. The same person can make different choices in different settings because the threshold changed. The threshold model explains something the funnel metaphor can't: why conviction and action aren't the same thing. Familiarity matters more than most teams account for. Familiar options don't just feel nicer. They feel less costly to think about. Trust doesn't just make a brand seem better. It lowers perceived risk. And retrieval matters because in buying situations, the option that comes to mind quickly starts with an advantage. The buyer ran no perfect comparison. One option arrived with less friction than the others. A lot of brand work operates by lowering that effort, reducing that uncertainty, and making the brand easier to retrieve. That's a less comfortable story than "great creative changes minds." It's closer to how thresholds actually move. Most of this work happens below conscious attention. The brain takes in far more than it ever registers. System 1 does the sorting, scanning for patterns it already recognizes and favoring what's familiar, fluent, and easy to retrieve. Kahneman called this cognitive ease: what's fluent feels true, what's familiar feels safe. System 2 arrives later with the explanation. --- ## People decide in situations, not as segments Most targeting assumes people decide as members of segments. That's convenient. It's also usually wrong. People don't use one stable rule for every choice. Low-stakes decisions need less proof. High-stakes ones need more. Familiar options often cross the threshold faster than unfamiliar ones. Time-poor decisions lean harder on cues and shortcuts. What matters isn't just who someone is. It's what they already know, how they feel, and whether the category is relevant right now. That's why Category Entry Points matter, and not just as an Ehrenberg-Bass planning framework. They're a practical reminder that buying decisions happen around triggers, needs, moments, and contexts. The question isn't just whether people know your brand. It's whether they know when to think of it. A brand not linked to the right moments will struggle to come to mind when it matters, even if people say they know it. High scores in a brand tracker don't tell you whether that awareness is attached to the situations where buying actually happens. Mental availability isn't general awareness. It's situational retrieval. --- ## Awareness isn't one thing Marketing uses the word "awareness" far too loosely. If someone buys from your bakery and loves the pie, that leaves one kind of trace. If a trusted friend tells them your baked goods are great, that leaves another. If they simply see your ad, that leaves a third. All three often get grouped together as awareness, but from a decision-making standpoint they're not the same thing. They shape perceived benefits, uncertainty, and belief differently. Which means they shape memory differently. Which means they shape future choice differently. I've seen this in B2B too. People would tell us they liked following our founder on Twitter. They trusted the way he thought. They felt familiar with the company before they ever got deep into the product. That familiarity didn't replace the product. We still had to meet the need and make the economics work. But it changed the starting point. The company felt more knowable. More credible. Easier to take seriously. Personal experience, borrowed trust from a recommendation, confidence built through a founder's presence, and familiarity built through repeated advertising don't all do the same job. They create different conditions for choice. Repeated, consistent advertising can build familiarity, reduce mental effort, and strengthen expectations over time. It can make a memory easier to access when the moment of choice arrives. But that's different from assuming every exposure produces the same kind of awareness, or that a single impression does the same work as experience or recommendation. Choice is often shaped cumulatively, not theatrically. Lumen's attention research, across over 9,000 brand lift studies, confirms the pattern. Aggregate attention time, the accumulation across exposures, is the strongest indicator of brand preference and intent. Consistent presence does what a single impression can't. Consistency matters more than most teams want to admit. If the cues keep changing, the expectation stays unstable. If the brand looks and sounds different every time, the pattern never compresses. Distinctive assets work as retrieval devices. They help the brain recognize a pattern faster and with less effort. A brand becomes useful when it becomes an easy expectation to retrieve, not when it wins a philosophy debate. --- ## People answer an easier question Affect is information, not noise. The affect heuristic is about the brain using feeling as a proxy when the full question is hard, costly, or uncertain. It's not about people being "emotional" in the lazy way marketing often uses that term. Kahneman's version: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. In buying situations, the hard question might be: is this really the best option across all likely outcomes, tradeoffs, and risks? The easier question is usually closer to: does this feel familiar? Does this feel safe? Is this good enough to move? I've felt it in creative reviews. Work comes in that checks every box. The message is clear, the positioning lands, the brief is met. But something in the room goes quiet. No one can point to a specific line. It just doesn't feel right. That feeling is information. The faster system is processing something the brief couldn't fully name: whether it sounds true, whether it's the kind of thing a customer would actually recognize, whether it's good enough to put in front of people who matter. The harder question is impossible to answer in the room. So the room answers the easier one. That's not a failure of thought. It's how judgment becomes manageable under uncertainty. Feeling is part of the input here, not a distortion of it. Under uncertainty, "how do I feel about this?" can stand in for harder questions about value, risk, and future outcomes. That's one reason trust, familiarity, and relevance matter so much. They don't just decorate the decision. They make it possible to act. --- ## Higher-stakes decisions still use heuristics The standard pushback is that all of this may be true for low-attention consumer choices. Complex purchases are different. More stakeholders, more steps, more explicit analysis, more visible tradeoffs. That's true. It doesn't rescue the old model. At a fiber internet company, we evaluated an MMM platform with a six-figure price tag. The decision wasn't some perfectly rational reset from zero. Our CMO had seen Mutinex almost a year before I bought it. By the time we got serious, they were already on the shortlist. We still had to do the demos, the diligence, and the comparison. But the decision only really moved when a few things came together at once. I was being asked measurement questions I couldn't answer with the tools we had. Were radio ads working? Were sponsorships working? What was actually incremental? Everything was still being judged through last-click attribution in Google Analytics, which mostly told us what happened closest to conversion, not what was driving demand. At the same time, it had become a CMO priority and a board priority. The alignment that had been forming for months finally clicked into place. The threshold dropped. The decision moved. The formal explanation usually sounds like vendor evaluation, pricing, and fit. All of that matters. But most of the real movement had happened earlier and around it: familiarity, credibility, urgency, internal alignment, and whether the organization was finally ready to act. More analysis doesn't eliminate heuristics. It layers them into a more formal process. --- ## Marketing mistakes the explanation for the decision Marketing treats reflective explanation as if it were the decision process. That's where the measurement problem actually lives. What did you notice? What did you like? What do you remember? What would you say you intend to do? Those questions are useful. They can diagnose memory, comprehension, liking, and salience. They just don't tell you the whole decision. A buyer may be able to explain the message clearly and still never act. Another may struggle to say why the brand feels right and still choose it later. One exposure may be verbally memorable but commercially weak. Another may feel slight and still do important work by reinforcing familiarity, trust, and situational fit. I've seen work that was easy for people to explain and did very little in market. And I've seen simpler work that looked less impressive in the debrief but made the brand easier to retrieve later. The measurement system mostly called the first kind the success. The attribution window opened after the decision had already started forming and named whatever showed up last as the cause. It was built for a deterministic model. Money in, buyers out. Buying is probabilistic. The familiarity that lowered the threshold, the salience that made the brand retrievable, the trust that made the choice feel safe: all of it accumulated before the window opened. None of it appears in the report. A coherent explanation isn't a reliable predictor of choice. --- ### The Monday Version Most briefs start with who the buyer is. Map the situation first. Jenni Romaniuk's work on Category Entry Points at Ehrenberg-Bass names seven dimensions of any buying moment: When does the need arise? Where is the buyer? Why is the category relevant? While doing what? With or for whom? Alongside what other category? With what feeling attached? Run those questions for your category before writing a brief. ``` CEP Audit — 7W Framework (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute / Jenni Romaniuk) What's your product or category? (One sentence — what you sell and who buys it.) W1 — When: When does the need for your category become urgent? Think trigger events, calendar moments, business cycles, or a question someone couldn't answer in a meeting. W2 — Where: Where is the buyer when this need surfaces? Physical location, workflow, platform, or channel. W3 — Why: What problem or job makes your category relevant right now? What just became urgent that wasn't before? W4 — While: What else is the buyer doing when this need surfaces? What adjacent task is it interrupting or emerging from? W5 — Who: Who else is in the decision? Alone, or is there a committee, champion, CFO to convince? W6 — With: What other categories are they evaluating at the same time? What else is on the table alongside yours? W7 — Feeling: What's the emotional state when the need arises? Time pressure, anxiety, relief, urgency, curiosity? Output: Write one situation sentence per distinct buying moment you identify. Format: "A [role] [when/context], [what triggered the need], looking for [what they need the brand to be]." ``` "Our buyer is a VP of Marketing" is a segment. "A VP at year-end, in a budget meeting where the CFO just asked what marketing contributed, looking for a vendor the board will recognize as credible." That's a situation. It tells you what the brand needs to do, where it needs to show up, and what the decision criteria actually are. Opening Folders, JD