Should marketers be more ‘left brain’ or ‘right brain’?

When I started my career in marketing, it was common to be described as a ‘left brain’ or ‘right brain’ type of marketer. The left-brained, more analytical kind would tend to work in category management/trade marketing roles, while the right-brained, more creative type would land the advertising and communication roles. 

Nowadays, things aren’t as binary as that.

In most businesses, the various disciplines of marketing are more intertwined than ever before, all while marketing and sales fuse into revenue generation. Indeed, gone are the days of the vanity marketing metrics of TVRs and impressions; the ultimate goal for marketing teams in a performance-driven business, is to deliver on commercial metrics such as customer acquisition, customer lifetime value, and sales.

Within companies using goal-setting frameworks such as OKRs, it is clear to see how marketers contribute to the overarching goals which, for commercial ventures, would most likely include elements of revenue and profit.

With such performance metrics to deliver, what do marketers need to succeed?

Curiosity

Whatever specialist discipline they may perform - be it paid search, SEO, social media, CRM or other - marketers need to have an inquisitive mind to drive performance metrics forward.

What may have caused that drop or uplift in performance? How do needs vary by customer segment or behaviours by cohort? How effective is this user journey or promotion? How can we optimise this campaign to drive better conversion? How about testing different alternatives to find out? Result-driven marketers are curious about identifying problems and opportunities that they can address to improve performance.

Which is why an ability to interrogate and analyse data is crucial. 

Data can tell insightful stories about customers, campaigns, user experience and trading performance. It can help identify problems and opportunities. 

Problem-solving

To solve all these kinds of challenges and opportunities, marketers need to think creatively about solutions.

Using the term ‘problem’ loosely to define an issue to be solved or a creator’s challenge such as crafting a campaign’s message, problem-solving is essentially about ideas. And therefore requires creativity. 

For example, a good PPC marketer doesn’t just need good analytical skills; they also need to be creative with ideas they can test to improve performance, or hypotheses behind a particular trend to experiment with. Reversely, a good designer will embrace analytical insight to inform the development of compelling visuals or a UI that drive the desired engagement and response: data and analytics can enable and empower creative people to come up with the most effective creative solutions. 

Informed decision-making

Everyday, marketers need to make decisions big or small, that impact business performance. 

Using data and analytics can form the basis for sound decision-making:

• What targeting strategy should we use to launch this new feature based on the buyer persona?
• Which acquisition incentive will return the highest profit?
• How should we modify this landing page to improve conversions?
• Which campaign delivers the highest ROI to upweight our budgets towards?
• And so on.

The bottom line

Today’s successful marketers should be able to draw from both their left brain and right brain. 

Whether their objective is sales, demand generation or lead generation, they need an inquisitive, and problem-solving mindset that requires to be both analytical and creative - not one or another.

Analytical and creative thinking are two very different practices; but by leveraging and combining both the logical, data-driven and rational side of the brain and the visual, creative and emotional side, marketers can serve customers in better, more effective ways and have a greater impact on business results.

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Mai Fenton is Chief Marketing Officer at Superscript, a London-based Series A tech scale-up that provides flexible, customisable business insurance for small businesses by monthly subscription.

Mai has experience of scaling brands and driving profitable growth across a range of businesses from start-ups through to multi-million pound global enterprises, with a diverse background which spans consumer packaged goods, lifestyle, retail, ecommerce and technology.