Are we using the right data? What other factors should we consider that aren’t in the data? How much weight should we give to the insight from certain data? Are we asking the right questions in the first place?
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Therefore, ironically, this is one of the places where “art” still remains in marketing management. And, that’s harder than you might think, thanks to a psychological quirk known as confirmation bias. The real essence of data-driven decision making isn’t merely using data, though it’s striving to use data objectively.
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What you’re doing with data is also important, whether it’s mining data for forward-looking exploration or reviewing data for confirmation of past performance: A Harvard Business Review blog post on The Hidden Biases in Big Data cautions managers to resist “data fundamentalism,” the belief that data has all the answers and that techniques such as predictive analytics always reflect the objective truth. However, we have to be careful not to overreach, reading more into the data than is actually there. It’s a huge step forward in marketing management and culture. When facing a marketing choice - Should we buy top-of-the-funnel keywords? Should we offer a discount in our ads? When is retargeting effective and when is it annoying? - the more scientific approach is to seek data to help answer these questions.īecause the digital environment gives us access to a prodigious amount of data, and because there is a plethora of marketing technologies that can help us analyze and leverage such data, this approach is increasingly practical across a wide range of marketing decisions. In contrast, marketing as a science favors data-driven decision making. Data-Driven Decision Makingĭata is at the core of the marketing-as-a-science movement.Ĭolloquially, the “art” of marketing management in the past can be characterized primarily as decisions that were made from the gut (intuition) based on experience. What makes an approach to marketing scientific? In what ways does it differ from marketing as an art? And how far should we take this? Is science driving out the art of marketing completely? Or are they complementary worldviews?Īfter reading many articles on this subject and talking with numerous marketing practitioners, I’ve come to believe that “marketing as a science” can be distilled into four principles - with caveats.
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“Yes, marketing is more of a science today.” That just feels like a true statement, doesn’t it? In our digitized and data-deluged world of modern marketing, these phrases resonate. What is the future of marketing? You can almost hear “Science!” as intoned by a popular 80’s song by Thomas Dolby.Īcross our profession, more and more people are talking about marketing science, scientific marketing, marketing as a science (in contrast to an “art”), and so on.