You know that story about the guy looking for his keys below a streetlight? He doesn’t actually know where he lost them, but he knows “this is where the light is.”
It’s called the streetlight effect, and it’s a form of observational bias suggesting people approach problems not from the best angle but from the easiest. It’s been used to explain everything from indicators of poverty to the (dubious) usefulness of reducing cholesterol in addressing heart disease. If you’ll pardon me now, I’d like to use it again to discuss my favorite topic: sales and marketing.
