Is Marketing an Art or a Science?

by Richard Guha    

As Peter Drucker said, were marketing ever to be able to do its job perfectly, there would be no need for the sales function. Customers would just buy.  Perhaps it is not a science at all, or perhaps the data is just so imperfect that it can never accurately and completely drive decisions.  Many senior marketers believe they have enough experience that they do not need new data.  So do many junior marketers. After all, they can point to people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Forrest Mars as incredibly successful marketers who never relied on hard, codified data.

Many people think either that marketing is easy or that there are naturally instinctive marketers who do not need to work hard at analyzing data.  The actual incidence is so low that virtually no one is.  For almost everyone, they can become better marketers if they take a scientific or perhaps an engineering approach which would be more practical.

This first means the definition and collection of data.  If something is real, it can be measured.  Years of back data are among the strengths of Procter & Gamble.  A company cannot suddenly decide to collect back data!  When the data is available, analysis informed by experience and insight is essential.

One of the problems in this debate is that many marketers come to believe that they can make decisions based on their experience and intuition alone.  They do not feel that they need new and thorough data.  While the success of Steve Jobs may suggest that this can occur, its rarity suggests that the vast majority of people do not have this talent.  So, for almost everyone, they are more successful if they treat marketing as a data driven science and spend much thought and effort into defining the data needed, collecting it and analyzing it.

However, it is interesting that the very few people who do not need this are those that invent the future rather than predict it. James Dyson re-imagined the vacuum cleaner and when he tried to sell his technology to existing marketers, they sent him away.  Akio Morita, founder of Sony, created the Walkman without any market research, but his successors failed to understand that the MP3 player would replace it.  Clarence Birdseye was a college dropout who created the frozen food industry. The list of people who did not collect marketing data but created markets is long. Unless, we really believe that we are the ones to change the world, we should treat marketing as a science first.

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