[COMMENT] If I have to hear another marketing person drone on and on about the “balance of art and science in marketing,” you might have to commit me to a psychiatric facility. I love marketing, but as one of the proud in this profession, I have to say, “We need some new material”.
Every senior marketer and senior agency person uses this cliché to describe their “unique” approach to strategy and the ways in which they should be evaluated.
It’s time to abandon this trope and call it what it is. Some of what you do has no true measurement, and that’s where the gamble in marketing resides.
Marketing strategies are written every day, and most of them follow a semblance of the same structure. They all try to push customers down a path of awareness to interest to desire to action. Each step allows for a hypothesis (some call that “art”), followed by an action and measurement (some that call “science”).
In 1919 there was mostly art, but in 2019 science is dominant. Every great idea has a desired outcome, no matter how far removed.
If you look at the recent Super Bowl, you see ads like the one from the Washington Post that is a pure awareness campaign, intended to generate renewed trust in the press. You also see Bud Light with its “No Corn Syrup” campaign that addressed a health-related issue in a fun beer ad, with the ultimate goal of generating increased share of market for Bud Light. One ad has a very intangible long-term, broad-reaching goal while the other is more immediately focused. Is one more art than science, or vice versa?
The greatest brands in the world know that marketing is an investment in time and story.
Marketers need to simply acknowledge that some of what they do is a gamble, with minimal measurement that can be attributed. Most marketers will agree you have to build a brand that creates trust in the minds of your target consumer, and they will come up with some proxy to measure that because the CFO wants them to, but trust is a hard thing to measure — and it takes time and experience to build it.
I personally am very data-driven and think that every idea you come up with, and every story you want to tell, can be proven right or wrong based on the data – but I heartily acknowledge that sometimes proof comes much further down the line and can be impossible to measure in the short term.
The greatest brands in the world know that marketing is an investment in time and story.
Across both B2C and B2B brands, there are companies that have invested in telling a story and chose not to worry about measuring the impact of that story in the short term because they knew what they were doing was the right thing to do. It’s a gamble to have a marketer at the helm who says this out loud, but it’s the truth.
When you want to build a brand, you have to understand why your users love you and tell a story that aligns with it, and proceed to say it loudly and proudly and not worry about what others are saying about you. Building a brand is not art or science – it is a conviction.
Cheers to the folks with conviction.
This post was first published by MediaPost.com and is republished here with the permission of the author.
Cory Treffiletti is chief marketing officer at Voicera. He has been a thought leader, executive and business driver in the digital media landscape since 1994. In addition to authoring a weekly column on digital media, advertising and marketing since 2000 for Mediapost‘s Online Spin, Treffiletti has been a successful executive, media expert and/or founding team member for a number of companies and published a book, Internet Ad Pioneers, in 2012.
