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More and more people declare "marketing is a science, not an art". Sure, marketing tests should be rigorous. But the process of determining what to test, how to measure it, and how to frame the right hypothesis takes imagination. Science is about discovery. Marketing as a science shouldn’t mean marketing as accounting.
4 Comments  

Comments

from theGypsy 471 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Nice post... too many marketers, online one’s in particular, forget the role of qualitative market resarch and focus hard on quantifyable metrics. This is particularly true in social media where it is pretty intuitive to do so.....

from Jill 471 Days ago #
Votes: 0

This certainly applies to search marketing as well. This was a good article, although it probably could have been cut in half as I got bored halfway through! :)

from theGypsy 471 Days ago #
Votes: 0

ha ha ha... are we back to the ADHD again Jill? Or us old folks just have a limited attention span? I know many of my posts do run long so I guess it’s my kinda reading. I was personally interested as I was musing in a post the other day about how the worlds of SMM and qualitative research could potentially work together (and do already to a certain extent); Social Media Marketing meets Qualitative Research - I found that qual researchers were struggling with not only using online avenues, but harnessing larger newtworks... it is an interesting topic (to me at least).

from chiefmartec 470 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@theGypsy, thanks for the comments here and on the blog. Just read your article on qualitative research and social media marketing and found it very inspiring. In the context of what I was thinking about it struck me as a fantastic "hypothesis generation engine".@Jill I do tend to ramble. ;-) Thought about putting the Alan Lightman anecdote in its own post, but since that talk strongly influenced my own beliefs about the intersection of science and marketing, my internal editor capitulated.

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