Kind and Wicked Experience in Marketing Management

Our society venerates experience. It feels right to trust our own experience and that of others. But experience also has adverse effects. Much learning is tacit in nature and, because people are typically unaware and uncritical of the conditions in which this takes place, experience can lead to false beliefs and subsequent actions can reinforce biases. We adopt a two-settings framework in which experience is conceptualized as being acquired in one setting (learning) and then applied in another (target). When information in the two-settings match, the learning environment is kind . Wicked environments are characterized by mismatches and we specify several different types. We note that many inferential errors occur because people implicitly assume informational matches between the two settings. In addition to its explanatory value, the two-settings framework has normative implications. We illustrate these by considering some of the decision-making challenges faced by marketing managers.