In what must be one of the most valuable marketing defintions ever created, Donald F. Cox defined a product as "an array of cues."

Cox, who broke ground in marketing intangibles, understood that consumers could not possibly evaluate a pure intangible product – something that one can't touch or see. But Cox understood that consumers don't think about the fact that they don't know what they don't know. They form an opinion about the inherent goodness or badness of a product by drawing conclusions from what they do know, not from what they don't. Customers make inferences all the time. They make those inferences from cues that they read.

For example, if the receptionist at an accountant's office who answers the phone is unfriendly or rude, you may choose not to patronize that accountant. Maybe the accountant is, in fact, very competent, but the receptionist is having a particularly bad day. What we tend to do is generalize from the specific: bad phone service equals bad accounting service. Is it logical? No. Is it human nature? Absolutely.

It is human nature to never lets an absence of factual information get in the way of creating an opinion about something.

In the absence of evaluative criteria, people create surrogate criteria (cues) from which they draw conclusions. They read cues. We all do this every day, and we aren't necessarily aware that it is happening.

Think about it. You're in the meat section of your supermarket looking to buy hamburger to make chili. Most of the packages contain meat that's bright red, but one is gray-brown. Do you choose the one that stands out? Probably not, because red equals fresh in your mind and the unappetizing gray-brown color probably signals "old" to you. Since you don't have the facts, you read the cues.

Few people know that a small quantity of carbon monoxide gas is pumped into meat packaging to create that bright red color. Maybe the fact is that the grayish-brown meat is freshest, but something interrupted the carbon monoxide packaging process. We don't know the facts, but we think we do. We judge by what we think we know.

An indispensable strategy in marketing intangibles is managing evidence in order to produce a particular conclusion from our target audience. When we understand that consumers read cue arrays to make decisions, we begin to construct those arrays to lead consumers to draw the conclusions we want them to draw. We bring to bear the power of intention. We manage the evidence of excellence as we understand the consumer defines it.

If we're a butcher, we adjust our packaging strategy to make the meat red because red equals fresh, and fresh is the single most important qualitative dimension of excellence that consumers use to evaluate products. In the food category, cues that read fresh are powerful.

This time of year, marketers are gearing up for their fourth quarter marketing campaigns - the quarter when most revenues are produced in many categories.

When you evaluate any part of a marketing effort to determine whether it will do the job or not, examine the array of cues it transmits. What tone does the effort convey? Does the effort convey the attributes that matter to your audience?

Does the headline or copy create a meaningful counterpoint to the visual and physical cue array? How do these things play off one another? Is the array consistent, or are the cues internally inconsistent? These things matter because a confused or skeptical prospect isn't as likely to move beyond consideration to choice.

To develop intangible product-marketing skills, marketers must practice actively differentiating tangible attributes from cues. It is important to practice the discipline of mindfulness so that we recognize what's happening while its happening.

Human beings are sophisticated and canny. The process of natural selection has almost certainly ensured that those of us who have survived nature's culling process are extremely sensitive and savvy when it comes to reading cues. It's like sensing when a dangerous person is moving toward you on the sidewalk at night. How do you sense that you might have a problem? Chances are, you've read a cue array.

Your audience reads cues every day. Learning to construct vivid cue arrays is a valuable skill - one that cannot be learned too soon or too well.