The increasing role of science in marketing and advertising

Adam Ferrier is a Consumer Psychologist, co-founder of MSIX the Marketing Science Ideas Exchange and best selling co-author of The Advertising Effect. I caught up with him about the role of science in marketing and the importance of the symbiotic relationship between the Mad Men and the Math Men in driving innovation, creativity and most importantly performance.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’ve got the great pleasure of having a chat to Adam Ferrier who is a consumer psychologist and co-founder of MSIX the Marketing Science Ideas Exchange. Welcome, Adam.

Adam:

Hi, Darren.

Darren:

The thing that I wanted to particularly have a chat about today is this whole idea of science in marketing ‘cause coming from a science and medical research background I find that so many people feel incredibly uncomfortable with those two concepts.

Adam:

Yeah, I think science has historically had a kind of a shield around it, which made it feel quite impenetrable and it had no place at all in the world of marketing. To get stuck straight into it about 10 or 15 years ago a guy called Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel laureate for economics and in so doing kind of discovered or built behavioural economics.

And behavioural economics was the first time that economics had been treated as a science. Before that it was just a whole bunch of theories and what they have done in the world of behavioural economics suddenly made science feel much more applicable and applied and also somewhat commercialised as well.

Darren:

I think accessible to a commercial application because it’s easier to distinguish pure and applied science and people often argue that in our modern world people should be looking at the applied science but there’s also a role for pure science as well because that’s where often a lot of initial interesting ideas are generated which will find themselves into being applied.

Adam:

But I think you’re already going to start freaking out a lot of people when you start talking like that who are going to be listening to this podcast and go, ‘shit, this is going to be too science-y, it’s going to get boring’.

When I was a psychologist (and I still am) everyone used to call psychology a soft science—it used to piss me off because there’s nothing soft; it’s just a difficult and complex science but still the scientific rigour is needed to understand and get sure footing around certain principles.

Darren:

You’re right. I don’t want to be a Sheldon here from Big Bang Theory and start saying, ‘well there’s only one pure science and everything else is irrelevant’ but I think it’s because the sciences based around human beings are incredibly complex because human beings are incredibly complex, aren’t they?

Adam:

That’s right and the way I look at the science of human behaviour or psychology is in the 50’s and 60’s a really good fundamental understanding of humans was investigated and we had really kind of big effects sizes for lots of the various types of experiments that were being done and ever since then it’s got more and more derivative of those kinds of things.

So, we’re finding out less and less of those big things about humans work and it’s becoming more and more nuanced. I think one of the things that holds science as an application in marketing back is that it’s just not worth it sometimes.

So, you might understand or find out something’s really true but it just doesn’t have that big an effect size and because scientists are really keen to publish everything they learn, sometimes the effect size of what they’re talking about can be really really small so therefore it might be interesting but not really worth knowing.

The role of science in marketing

Darren:

So my interest here is the fact I think there’s a lot of things about science methodology that could fit really well with the marketing process, for instance a cornerstone is the scientific method: the idea of how to take an observation, make a hypothesis, design an experiment, carry out the experiment, look at the results and see whether the hypothesis is proven or not.

So, science, beyond just the insights you’re talking about, that science can evolve and prove and then use those to inform marketing there’s a bigger gain here from my perspective, which is to actually embrace the practices of science, to take marketing from being an opinion-driven industry to more a fact-based or data-based application.

Adam:

Yeah, I think that’s a very worthy thing to do but there is a ‘but’. I don’t know why I’m being so negative against what I try to do but one of the issues is and I think the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute are doing a good job of being more science-based and evidence-based in their reporting of various marketing principles. Lots of marketers don’t necessarily want to know the truth.

We’re more interested in the whole of business and creating success stories and more people’s careers are invested in success rather than invested in doing the right things. So, the scientific method: setting up a hypothesis, doing testing and learning, and then adapting as we go—to do that you have to be open to being wrong.

I think one of the biggest differences between people in marketing and scientists is scientists are prepared to be wrong—well most of them are. Some of them still lie about the edges and only publish when they prove things but marketing especially you’re not allowed to be wrong.

Darren:

Yeah, I’ve had that thrown back at me a lot and what I say is, ‘would you rather do a small experiment that tells you whether you’re right or wrong or keep doing what you’ve been doing for the last 10 years not knowing it’s wrong but actually not achieving anything.

Adam:

That’s right and I hope this doesn’t sound boring but then we’re back to effects size—effects size versus resources needed to do the experiment. So, if you’re talking about something big and you can run a small experiment then the effects size is probably worth the complexity of doing it.

In our market, it often doesn’t happen as much as bigger markets. Take the States where I think it’s in some ways more progressed around the test and learn mindset because they’ve got the market size to warrant doing the initial exploration.

Darren:

What I’m seeing that’s changing that is a lot of marketers here are talking about agile marketing.

Adam:

What’s changing is the ease of being able to test and learn…

Darren:

The context.

Adam:

Which is much more nimble than it has been before.

The benefit of combining the art and the science

Darren:

That’s right digital data technology allows you to take groups of people and actually test against them and do it before, ‘what am I going to do, make two TV ads, run one on Channel 9 and one on Channel 7 in different markets and see what the result is?’

One, it’s too public so that the failure (and failure might not even be failure—it might be underperformance) would be too gross for someone to live with.

But the industry, to move the discussion forward, looks at science and marketing as two parts and we see that with Math Men and Mad Men (which I hate). We like thinking about dipoles. We like to say, ‘there’s science and that sits over there (and that’s all the propeller heads) and here’s all the cool mad men over here that work on gut instinct, but in actual fact the two inform each other, don’t they?

Adam:

Yeah, totally. There’s some really interesting businesses mainly in the tech space that are proving the best results are when the two things can be kind of blurred completely. So the true innovations and the fantastic kind of marketing-led businesses that are both clever and beautiful, they somehow find a way to bring those two things together by employing people who really understand data, the scientific method you’re talking about, as well as people who are humanistic, get the value of design, get the value of beauty and bring those different kind of disciplines together to create something great.

I disagree with you somewhat: I think they are different disciplines and I think they’re very hard to find in the one person. So, the clunky dichotomy of math men and mad men while it’s a bit ugly and stereotypical I kind a think it’s right. It’s normally an organisation that reconciles that rather than finding the one person who reconciles both of those things.

Darren:

So you’re saying as a label it’s often true that one person is either moved towards a science, analytical approach or they’re towards a more intuitive relationship approach.

Adam:

I think so and I think the big picture dichotomy is also kind of true as well. And we’ve struggled with this in terms of purely in a creative sense trying to find really data literate creatives and they are very creative but in a different kind of way to the non-data literate creatives.

Darren:

But it’s interesting for me because in my experience, and I have a lot of friends who are scientists and especially mathematicians……

Adam:

And they’re all really creative.

Darren:

They’re incredibly creative. They’re into music, they’re into art. We talk about people like they’re two-dimensional. Some of the greatest doctors I’ve ever worked with are also unbelievable cooks and artists and musicians and yet they perform amazing surgery and do unbelievable research.

The idea that someone fits a pigeonhole of either being creative or intuitive doesn’t feel real to me.

Adam:

It doesn’t to me either when you talk about the person in a holistic sense but maybe when you come down to the craft of what they’re actually getting paid to do maybe they do tend to fall into one box or the other a little bit more. So, your surgeon could be a really beautiful musician but would he take a creative approach to surgery? Probably not. He’ll probably take a more scientific approach to that.

Darren:

His application would be different except that even in the scientific method we mentioned before the observation and hypothesis is a creative process.

Adam:

It is massively creative.

Darren:

And in fact what I like about it is it’s a distillation. When anyone asks me, what creativity was when I was a creative director I’d go, ‘it’s a bit like coming up with a hypothesis, you observe, you think about it, and then you create a hypothesis. The hypothesis is the interpretation of the patterns you saw in the observation that perhaps no one else had seen previously—and to me that is creativity.

Adam:

That’s right. Coming back to these tech companies—you’ve got beautiful platforms that feel great purely based on data but people tend to test and learn and optimise within a various area. They tend to get very skilled and a little myopic in that. Then they sometimes tend to optimise what’s best within that particular world rather than being able to take a step back and look at the broader picture.

That’s what I mean by maybe sometimes these people have both skill sets but when it comes down to the applied craft or what they’re doing they enter a particular mindset and maybe it’s harder to change gears.

Read the rest of this post here