Science does not dictate Action

Marketing action does not follow from marketing theory nor empirical generalizations. Instead, action needs to be informed by a complicated blend of judgments about ambiguous empirical evidence, conflicting theories, and sensibilities that may be framed, but are not determined by marketing science. In other words, marketing action is a blend of engineering and judgment, an art and a craft, not a scientific endeavor as a search for truth. This week, I got inspired both by the excellent talks at the Sheth Doctoral Consortium (featuring Don Lehmann's in this piece) and by the book 'Where Economics Went Wrong' (Colander and Freedman 2019).

Unfortunately, marketing science doesn’t see marketing action as an art and craft. Instead, it conceives action as an applied science, and believes advice should follow directly, and only from the application of marketing science. To some degree, that makes sense. Clearly, we want an evidence-based, objective analysis of marketing action. An art and craft perspective uses theory and science wherever it can, meaning to the extent in which it is appropriate. But when dealing with the messy issues of the real world, statistical evidence needs interpretation, and our views are inevitably influenced by our normative judgements. To pretend otherwise undermines both the science in marketing science, and marketing action discussions.

Just as both welfare economics and the Chicago School of laissez-fare abandoned this wisdom of classic liberal economists after the World Wars, marketing science has become obsessed with methodology. Fancy mathematics, extensive experiments and their analysis can indeed answer the narrow research questions they were designed for, but please don’t pretend practical guidance directly follows. Each model is wrong, because it is based on assumptions that are useful for some issues, but not for others. Different assumptions can and do lead to different results and policy implications.

???????????If big brands have lots of customers, most of which only buy them occasionally, does that mean every marketer can grow their brand by focusing on reach and light (and non) buyers, instead of increasing loyalty and usage of existing buyers? If consumers sometimes buy brands that appear to the researcher as giving them less utility, does it follow that they must be following some long-term utility function maximized by sampling new products? If research finds that Google and Facebook do not significantly deter innovation and that their buying of competitors yields them negative stock returns, does it follow the government should allow them to continue on this path?

Science only deals with right or wrong; while marketing action and government policy must deal with shades of grey through the forceless force of the of the stronger argument in conversation. That’s why interactive meetings are so crucial in business and government versus the long anonymous feedback cycles in academia. We can accept Kevin Keller’s Customer Based Brand Pyramid and still do not advise our company to invest in emotional brand building because it simply does not have the capabilities. We can accept Ehrenberg’s double jeopardy holds in our industry, and still believe we can differentiate our brand and grow through keeping loyal customers who will share their positive feelings with others, thus swelling the customer base without much paid advertising. We can accept Keynesian theory while arguing that the current government should not run discretionary fiscal policy because of its inability to determine, and/or act, in what we consider the social interest. The Tyranny of Theory, in Don Lehmann's words, harms academic relevance AND rigor.

In economics, Stigler used quantitative methods only to persuade others of the answers he already knew before analyzing the data. In contrast, marketing science has a tradition of exploration, of econometric models that don’t require heroic assumptions for identification, and of qualitative and experimental research that uncovers insights unknown. Let’s increase such voices in our communities and integrate methods to find the best current answer we can for today’s pressing problems. Now THAT's something to get passionate about.