Do people in the music industry understand music?

And do people in the Advertising Industry understand brands?

Everyone is familiar with the experience. You go into a record shop and are treated with disdain because of your drearily mainstream tastes. Or, in the days when they existed, you wandered into a video rental shop and irritated the cinephile staff by renting Titanic.

The Onion even parodies this effect. So did Not the Nine O'Clock News with the legendary "Gramophone" sketch.

The point that these sketches make is that, in any field, the difference between an expert and the ordinary public is not just a difference of degree - it is a yawning gulf of mutual incomprehension.

So, for instance, the only people not to like the film Mamma Mia are film critics. The only people not to like ABBA are music journalists (or wannabe music journalists). And the only people not to like J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are pretentious literary types. Like me.

Just occasionally there are people who manage to attract both the high-brow and the mainstream (in a 30-year-old survey of high-brow and low-brow literary heroes, Raymond Chandler was the only man to make it onto both lists). But this is rare.

 What's going on? Happily, I think behavioural economics (you weren't expecting that, were you?) and the idea of the paradox of choice may help us understand this gulf.

If you are an expert in a field, you are a maximiser. Your car is Teutonic. You listen to relatively obscure Indie music. You wear niche clothes brands, like those funny jeans with a wiggle on them. You eat at restaurants you have learned about through recommendation or reviews. And go on holiday somewhere other than Spain, France or the USA. The maximiser seeks to find the very best of everything, and uses his consumption choices to define himself or herself apart from other people. The maximiser makes his choices with the aim of outdoing his or her peer group - to compete with other maximisers and to be differentiated from them.

The person I have depicted above may be one person. Some people are fearsomely competitive in everything. But most people tend to be maximisers in a few areas only - for most of us it's simply too much intellectual effort to compete in every field. Moreover, most people tend to be maximisers in those fields where they know a great deal about the subject, or in the field where they are employed. If you work in the music industry, say, and compete for advancement with a bunch of people who have "just discovered a new Peruvian funk artist", it's not much good to spend your time raving about Girls Aloud.

Now, here's the issue. Most people, in most fields of consumption, most of the time are NOT maximisers at all. They are something completely different. They are satisficers. What they are doing is not using insane amounts of mental energy to attempt to optimise every decison. They are instead simply trying to avoid making a decision that is actually bad or which might cause them to look or feel foolist. For those people, good enough generally is. 

Most important of all, they are not using their brand choices to compete with their fellow man, or to draw distinctions between them and their peer-group. They are using them to fit in. To conform, not to outdo. You go to the films your friends like, you read the books your friends like, you listen to the music your friends like. It's safe, after all. And you drive the car your friends drive. Because what you are driven by is not the idea of choice optimisation, but (in behavioural terms) the much more powerful idea of risk aversion. By fitting in, you may not have the best musical taste in the world, or eat the best food, or drive the best car - but you won't go far wrong either. And, when making a puchase, what most people want, most of the time, is not the best they can buy: they want something that's very unlikely to be crap.

The difference between The Best and The Least Likely to be Shite seems a hairsplitting one. In fact they are almost opposites.

Yet marketers very rarely acknowledge this distinction when debating the role of the brand - and it pays little attention to the job of being assuredly not crap -  even though I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast-iron assurance of pretty dependable non-shitness. The Fina ad is one good example. Even better is that great CDP ad for Smirnoff - "why waste money on real lemons" - which I can't find - or the Volkswagen promise of reliability. But overall this proposition of "loss avoidance" is rare - most ads seek to boast a lot more than they reassure. Yet when you are handing over £1,000 to buy that flat screen TV, how much of your brain is worried about whether it is the best TV you can buy for £1,000, versus the part of the brain thinking "I hope this TV isn't a crock of shite"? I'd but the ratio at about 1:2.

Because we all work in the field, marketers and advertising people are by temperament maximisers when it comes to brands. They use the fine distinctions between them to delineate themselves and to highlight their individuality. Yet the vast bulk of the money in any market at any time is in the hands of Satisficers. People who want to meld with a peer group, not to outdo it, and people who are more eager to avoid social embarrassment or regret-inducing purchase mistakes than they are to display dominance.

Regret is a huge emotion, and people will pay huge sums to avoid it. You just need to watch Deal or No Deal to see this. 

And the avoidance of possible regret is a much bigger factor in brand selection than the pursuit of perfection.  It will kill people in advertising to acknowledge this, but Ford is a much better brand than Audi, and M&S is a much better clothes brand than whatever it is you young things are wearing nowadays.

Interestingly, although unfashionable, Satisficers are generally happier than maximiers. As one Brummie Ford driver once told us in a focus group: "I'm dead middle of the road, me. I love it."