I’ve always been a proponent of weighing the science part of marketing over the art. Trusting your gut can quickly get you into trouble and powerful artistry is great, but if it doesn’t get results, who cares? A recent Newsweek article discusses Super Crunchers, a book by Ian Ayres that proposes that we can no longer trust our intuition.
But is this true? And if so does it apply to the field of marketing? The data is out there to identify best practices and the “right ways to market. There are multiple case studies on how running various tests and collecting data pointed out needed changes that allowed for improved marketing. Are these numbers strong enough to rid us of the “art” of marketing?
Newsweek writer Jerry Adler explains how as journalism moves to the web, data on strory popularity is easily collected. Once this popularity data is analyzed, deciding what people want to read becomes evident with little human thought. This story is just one example of what Ayer proposes. Adler writes:
“…this (journalism example) is a microcosm of a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them ‘Super Crunchers,’ which is also the title of his book, the latest attempt to siphon off a bit of the buzz that surrounds the hugely successful ‘Freakonomics.’”
In the last ten years, baseball scouting has seen a revolution in the way players are drafted. Successful scouts place an increased emphasis on statistics rather than choosing players that look like great ball players. Those teams that rely on stats rather than gut instinct are proven to be more successful, even when they have smaller budgets. This is why the Oakland Athletics with a payroll of 6 million dollars can still compete with the New York Yankees who have a payroll of 194 million. Described in detail in the book Moneyball, the Athletics rely heavily on numbers rather than intution. Adler explains how baseball scouting isn’t the only field where this happens:
“In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.”
“Increasingly, jobs that used to call for independent judgment, especially about other people, are being routinized and dumbed down.”
We’ve seen the same trend in marketing. More and more of our decisions, as marketers, are based on research and collected data. There have always been “best practices” in our field, but now we have the data to prove it. In a way, I very much agree with the author. Relying on data and measurable results is critical in our field. If we can’t point to numbers to support our initiatives then we can’t justify our existence. We’re just guessing and producing pretty things. Marketing needs to drive business.
Yet for all the numbers we can collect on our activities, someone initially needs to come up with those ideas. To do A/B testing someone needs to create an A and a B. Certainly the best practices are out there, but they don’t tell you exactly what to write or what to design. In the future Google may discover that the best AdWords headline is five words long. You can do hours of research on your business and what consumers need, but in the end you’ll have to type those fives words. You’ll have to make a decision based on a combination of numbers and intuition.
In addition, marketing thrives on creativity and innovation. People respond to things that they don’t even know about, so how can one rely on data that doesn’t even exist. It's a chicken/egg problem. You need the numbers to create something, yet the numbers don't exist to create it. In that case you rely on a gut feeling and see what happens. Until a campaign, brochure, advertisement, etc. is created and measured you may not have the data to prove it works.
So in summary, numbers are critical to a marketer’s job. Do your due diligence in researching and identifying best practices for your particular campaign. Afterwards you must measure the success of the campaign on an objective scale. But the art of marketing is far from dead. If your gut tells you to go a certain direction and there’s no numbers to refute it, jump in. Computers have yet to demonstrate signifigant creativity.
Of course I could be wrong. We always thought man would triumph over a computer in complex tasks like chess. Is the art of marketing far behind? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
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