Why Marketing is a Science and an Art

Why Marketing is a Science and an ArtHi I’m Jordan, I love helping people think & grow their products. Hope this helps! You can find me on Twitter 🙂

Hi I’m Jordan, I love helping people think & grow their products. Hope this helps! You can find me on Twitter 🙂

I think that the best marketers are experimenters, not fortune tellers. They know that their assumptions are just assumptions — they are simply guesses on how they think their strategies will affect their customers and growth. They are not the law. They are open to change. And they let data talk.

The best growth people treat marketing like a science AND an art. It is a lever to help more people access your product.

It is an art because it is creative. It is imaginative. It has no bounds. It is a form of expression.

It is a science because it is controlled. It has inputs and outputs. Independent and dependent variables. It can largely be explained.

The balance is hard to achieve. Many people in the industry optimize for one of the two. Achieving both is very valuable.

Doing this is exceptionally challenging.

Why?

1. Recognition of Bias

It is nearly impossible to improve something you are not aware of. Most people are not aware of their own biases. They are unaware of their own internal reasons for doing things. They are unaware of motivating factors. Incentives. Why they want certain things and why they think their experiments will work.

Simply being aware is the first major obstacle in removing bias and letting data talk.

Recognizing bias is often as simple as working with lots of numbers. Numbers are cool (and helpful) primarily because they have no internal bias. You can often clearly see, when building out models or analyses, where the bias is coming from.

Founders and marketers with tons of personal bias tend to ignore numbers and say things like “trust me” or “I have done this before.”

2. Finding an Environment for Rapid Experimentation

We do not all operate in environments that allow for rapid and thoughtful experimentation. We do not all have the best labs to build out tests.

You’d think that startups may be better for moving fast. That is what everyone says…right?

“I want to work at / start my own company because I do not want to be bogged down by a big corporation.”

I love startups.

But I do not think that is true. I think startups are often limited by the resources they have at their disposal. They are also limited by pressures from both internal and external stakeholders. They have capital to return. They have a burn rate. They only have so much time before they sink.

This pressure makes it hard to experiment.

Big companies have some of the opposite problems. They have tons of resources — but also their cultures are often not conducive to trial and error. They want to invest in process that will 100% work — not that *may work*.

The best environments are those that allow people to fail and encourage testing. It can be hard for you to find a company that embodies that, even if they say they do on their website. The ones that do are rare and often produce great products driven by true experiments.