Don’t Data and Market: How Data is Making Marketers Worse

One of the greatest ironies of marketing is that awareness and “eyeballs” have been the gold standard for guiding and measuring various campaigns and brand success.

The problem is that much of marketing is subjectively driven. Although great strides have been made with social media tools there is still residue from the old days of marketing’s approach to data.

Marketers still spend a disproportionately large amount of their primary research budgets on advertising that is not rigorously tested, subjectively evaluating and measuring brand, and gauging product awareness through vanity measures.

The “quantitative” tests and tracking reports that make up the majority of this evaluative research only skim the surface.

What most marketers fail to understand are the underlying subconscious causes that often evade awareness. This involves deeply studying and understanding the customer better than they understand themselves.

One marketer who didn’t believe in consumer research was Steve Jobs.

Two decades later, a reporter asked how much market research went into the iPad, to which he famously replied-

“None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want”.

The iPad later went on to become one of the most successful product introductions in tech history despite the massive ridicule it first received online, most notably on Twitter.

The point is not to cease our efforts in collecting data and using it to help guide our tactics. Tactics follow strategy and the data will help adjust course towards marketing objectives.

The point is that they should help “guide” our decisions and not support them.

We must keep in mind that data tells us what happened and not what’s going to happen. Intellectual curiosity and creativity interpreting the data are what help produce powerful marketing campaigns and digital customer experiences.

One must adopt a discipline of “finding out” and constantly peeling the layers back to uncover more truth.

Investor and philanthropist Ray Dalio put it best when explaining “rather than thinking, ‘I’m right.’ I started to ask myself, ‘how do I know I’m right?”.

Rather than using data the same way a drunk uses a lamp post for support, marketers should consider using data for illumination.

Data won’t settle any interesting question; only curiosity will.

Omar M. Khateeb is medical device marketer with a focus on surgical robotics.

His interests reside in sales psychology, neuromarketing, and self-development practices.

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