The most expensive lie in marketing
My top conspiracy theory is that the "how did you hear about us" dropdown is the most expensive lie in marketing.
A neighbor talks you up for a month. The buyer finally caves, lands on the form, and clicks Instagram because it sat at the top of the list.
Instagram takes the credit. The neighbor takes nothing. So next quarter you pour more into Instagram.
Here's why it keeps happening. People can't remember where they first heard about you, so they name the thing they touched last. The ad they scrolled past on the way in. The channel with a logo they recognize. Word of mouth has no logo. It never asks to be credited.
So the dropdown quietly rewards the channels that are easy to name and starves the one that actually moved the person. Budget follows the credit. The credit follows the click. The click was never the cause.
But word of mouth is not invisible. It just doesn't live in a form field. It lives in a map.
When a neighbor tells three friends and those three tell a few more, the orders don't scatter evenly. They pile up. A town you never targeted starts showing up in your order file, growing faster than its population can explain, with no ad spend pointed at it.
We can't tell you it was the neighbor. Nobody can prove that. What we can see is a place accelerating past what population and paid spend account for. We say where. We don't guess the cause.
That's the part the dropdown will never give you. A name is a story someone half-remembers. A ZIP is a fact.
The neighbor never showed up in a dropdown. They showed up on a map, one town at a time.