Art and Science of Marketing

Art & Science of Marketing Scrappiness

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I get tons of questions from startups and industry leaders on how to be scrappy with their marketing while delivering results. In my many conversations with these folks about where to cut costs or bolster resources, I’ve noticed people tend to lean towards the art side or science side of marketing… but you really need to know and have both. 

What is the “art” and “science” of marketing?

In order to drive efficacy and efficiency, marketers must tread a delicate balance of art and science because marketers are dealing with people… and people are neither 100% emotional nor 100% pragmatic. We are driven by both, especially when we make decisions, so when marketing speaks to just one part of our behavior, it doesn’t work. This is when art and science matters…

The “art” part of marketing is really intuition and creativity. Intuition is having a sixth sense about human behavior, most likely honed from the brain’s ability to process millions of data points and recognizing a pattern, so when you see something interesting, you can quickly attach a hypothesis to that interesting event. Creativity comes from thinking outside the box and being able to mesh together disparate ideas to form something new. This becomes extremely beneficial when you’re creating new marketing strategies.

The “science” of marketing, on the other hand, is more quantifiable. This would include statistically significant tests providing results and insights that can be used throughout the iterative process of launching and testing products and campaigns. This would also include the large amount of data collected from your customers and processed by your data team. (Yes, big data is important, but don’t get lost in the details. Sometimes too much data can overshadow your customers’ true intentions.) The science part becomes very important to help balance out any previously formed biases. It also allows marketers to rinse and repeat actions that worked.

Bringing it back, in order for marketers to be successful at doing more with less, they need to understand their customers and the meaning behind their customer’s data, as in marketers must combine art (intuition and creativity) and science (data) when crafting the marketing response to their customers’ needs and wants. 

Here’s an example: 

  • Situation: Imagine if you’re in charge of increasing the # of new card members for your financial services brand. You have an insight that consumers tend to consider new cards when they’re about to make big travel decisions (e.g. honeymoon, family trip). You know—like the rest of the industry—majority of people spend their time on mobile, so you build a marketing campaign geared at advertising predominantly on mobile ad platforms that drive consumers to a mobile-friendly page where you talk about your company’s travel card options. Then, after several weeks of testing, you notice that the majority of your page sessions came from desktop, not mobile. You’ve confirmed the data is accurate. 
  • What would you do? Would you scrap the data and start over because your hypothesis was wrong? Would you assume those who travel are outliers and don’t use mobile while the rest of the customers segments still use mobile? Or, would you try to find a clear reason behind the behavior?
  • Reason: In this example, the reason turned out to be when consumers are making large purchase decisions like traveling on a honeymoon or a big family trip, they like to do research. They want to understand what are the different card options and what benefits/services those cards can provide (e.g. travel insurance, lounge access, pre-boarding amenities). And, research is best done on desktop (e.g. bigger screen, multi-tab capabilities)… That’s why when ads served on desktop appeared during the travel consumers’ research, they clicked through and went straight to the page and shortly thereafter applied for the card. Had the marketer in charge not dug into the reason behind the data, she would have missed the critical insight from this test: consumers want more information when it comes to large purchases. This meant, she could build out the landing page to provide even more information about card options, provide examples of other customers who have benefited from the card during their big travel moments, and even added additional cross-sell opportunities. All of this would help her with the primary goal of increasing the # of new card customers.

How other industries leverage art + science 

There are plenty of other examples in market to show how art and science combined can provide context and nuance to human behavior, which can then explain consumer needs, wants and purchase intent.

  • Every few months, the Federal Reserve publishes a collection of anecdotes from all around the country. This compilation is called the Beige Book. The stories—affectionately known as “Ask Your Uncle” snippets—can provide interesting insights into the economy. In a Planet Money podcast episode, the hosts noted how “beer sales at convenience stores, combined with reports from beer distributors, were one early sign of a slowdown in the homebuilding market before the crash.”
  • 538, an opinion poll website, better predicted the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries than professional pollsters because it used information “based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data…. Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina…. But a funny thing happened. The model got it right.”
  • Many data-heavy companies have built propensity models to predict which customers will more likely take action. This allows marketers to streamline their resources towards customers who deliver higher returns.

Takeaway

Overall, marketers need to use the art side of marketing to understand the underlying customer need/want and then use the science side of marketing to develop methodical ways of identifying leading indicators that the customers are moving towards. 

Culturally, we make fun of the ridiculous ways marketers (including designers) overly emphasize non-related characteristics to get a sense of a product or service. For example, in HBO’s Silicon Valley, a designer asks the founder what kind of an animal was his product, a simple black box to store enterprise data. A turtle? A jaguar? A cheetah? A gazelle? 

Though the exaggerated concept is hilarious, the reality is that marketers can gain a lot of information about their customers purchase intent from seemingly disparate smaller pieces of data. At the end, marketers just needs to understand their customers’ true intent and measure data that really matters.

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