Episode 964 – BACON – Chapter 16- The “Known Knowns”, “Known Unknowns”, and “Unknown Unknowns” of Marketing

The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

Growing up in New York, Yogi Bera was one of my favorite characters. He was a good player but even more of a philosopher (well, sort of).

Some of his most famous “Deep Yogi Thoughts” include:

• “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
• “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
• “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
• “You can observe a lot by watching.”
• “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.”
• “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
• “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

Baseball is a sport. It’s not quite as life-or-death as a gladiator in a Roman coliseum, but some people feel like it is (especially in the payoffs). But it’s certainly not war, or is it?

Speaking of war, Donald Rumsfeld had a Yogi Bera moment during a press conference in 2002. Rumsfeld was the U.S. Secretary of Defense in the period right after 9/11 when our leaders were contemplating attacking Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction.

The direct quote was, “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know, we don’t know.”

While that quote may be a bit confusing, the underlying concepts of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” have been used in various fields like project management, risk assessment, and strategic planning for decades. I would like to look at it from the perspective of marketing in today’s multigenerational, AI-infused digital online marketing world!