Friday, June 09, 2006

The art of Marketing

First, I never really understood what marketing means. In my mind, it was this distasteful mix of sales and advertizing and spin and gambling. No surprise that this quarter's graduate level Marketing class in my MBA was a revelation. A great professor notwithstanding, the big "Aha!" for me was that marketing has little to do with sales or advertizing. They are just spokes in a giant wheel of adoption cranked by sub-conscious emotions and/or pure economics, plain and simple. In other words, a marketer needs to work with two things - buyer's psychology, and econometrics - to predict how a firm could/should sell its product.

Sounds fairly simple, doesn't it? Well, not quite. Marketing has more art to it than science. You could play with your data any number of ways and come up with a different conclusion each time. You could analyze consumer behavior for days on end and predict the wrong thing (think New Coke). I think of myself as a fairly right-brained individual, with more creative juice than the regular engineer. But, I learned, a decade of engineering training does certain things to you. You approach analytical problems through a certain filter, looking for that needle in the haystack, that underlying thread that can explain the anomaly you are seeing. Well, that works only in science. Its like asking how much salt is needed for something thats cooking. The typical cook, atleast the ones I know, instruct me to add "what makes sense". How in the world do I know what makes sense. Tell me exactly how many handfuls or spoonfuls or granules of the darn thing I need to throw in. Nope. Sorry. Not deterministic. Just add what makes sense. Thats when I turn the stove off and throw my hands up in the air.

Marketing is sort of like that. Nebulous. Sneaky. I notice that the data does different things to different people. Some just dive in and play around in Excel and come up with graphs and tables, then try to explain what they are seeing. Some just sit back and think, and think, and think, then suggest something completely out of the box that flushes all the stuff the left-brainers did so far down the drain. I just pore over the data, wide-eyed, repeatedly, franctically, till something clicks. Then I dive in and rush through the train of thought and flesh it out in excruciating detail, often realizing at the end that I made some fairly simplistic assumptions along the way.

But hey, thats marketing for you. For all the data you can find and play with, at the end, all you can rely on is what the gut feels. Precisely.

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