Advertising executive Rory Sutherland introduced the doorman fallacy in his book, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. The doorman fallacy occurs when an organization equates strategy with improving cost savings and efficiency while reducing human labor to simplistic job descriptions and the easily quantifiable.  

The doorman “only” opens doors, so the company replaces the role with an automated door-opener. Sutherland argues that this approach accounts for the “notional role of a doorman” but is problematic due to missing “other, less definable sources of value,” including “taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition,” and “signaling the status of the hotel.”

The know-nothing advantage

Applying the doorman fallacy to marketing communications for skilled professionals frees your marketing team and agencies to create content in a bubble, totally disconnected from the lived experiences, sentiments, and in-the-field realities of your audiences.  

If you narrow the jobs of marketing professionals to flat, “notional roles,” and do the same for the engineers, architects, HVAC contractors and other tradespeople in your audience, you can confidently publish your meh quickly and at lower costs. This know-nothing advantage gives you fewer complexities to consider and reduces your audience to simple abstractions. Mechanical engineers and HVAC contractors are particularly easy-going, so it’ll be fine. 

LMO’s building products industry clients rely on professionals who learn from subject matter experts, read, and participate in the same digital and physical spaces as their audiences. But if you’re prompting and publishing anything, anyone (or thing) will do. 

Did we forget credibility?

Unfortunately, the “efficiency” and “savings” you might achieve by applying the doorman fallacy with prolific prompting could cost you credibility and visibility. 

Cultivating credibility with the professionals who may specify and install your products and solutions requires the level of care, study, connection, and craft we practice at LMO. I take back what I said earlier about mechanical engineers and HVAC contractors. Tradespeople definitely notice defects, delusion, and impracticality in content meant for them. And they’ll dismiss your message—if not your entire brand and product—efficiently. 

There’s a place for using tools like AI to work faster, but consistently worthwhile content requires professionals with skill, judgment, subject-matter expertise, and the unquantifiable knowledge that comes from engaging with people as people. If you’re launching or striving to grow a brand or product that needs buy-in from specifiers, designers, and installers, you want to work with professionals who can look beyond abstractions and marketing bubbles to the experiences, sentiments, and realities of your audiences. 

Thinking beyond legacy homo sapiens, a quality content bank—rich with comprehensive thought leadership material—helps brands and their narratives register as credible with AI tools. Keeping content fresh and suitable for third-party validation supports generative engine optimization (GEO). As your audience increasingly uses AI for search, cheap meh will fail to deliver useful visibility through GEO. 

Before I take my tongue fully out of my cheek, I’d like to apologize for failing to insert the LLM-mandated bulleted list until now. 

Here are my desperate pleas for moderation presented as a list: 

• Negative parallelism: Spend your “is not” and “it’s about” wisely. 

• Bold, nuance-free assertions: They get the people going, but deploy with care and be mindful of skeptics. 

• Em dashes welcome: They were good enough for Toni Morrison, so they’re good enough for you. Unless your style guide forbids it, you may use them judiciously. 

• Complete the cyborg: Take advantage of the tools afforded by our human-plus-machine lifestyles, but use them responsibly with people qualified to validate machine output for accuracy, relevancy, context, and human well-being. 

No more meh. Your brand, your audiences, and our emerging artificial overlords deserve better.