Here’s a question: Is marketing an art or a science?
Most people have a tendency to lean toward the notion that marketing is an artform. Being the most ‘creative’ department at most companies, it makes sense. But ‘art’ by way of ideation, creative design, branding, is only a small part of marketing as a whole.
Marketing is a science, not an artform.
At its core, marketing is rooted in studying the behaviors of consumers within an industry and formulating predictions and explanations based on evidence.
Marketing follows the same standard order of operations as most sciences, beginning with observation, identification, and description, and evolving into experimental investigation to land at a theoretical explanation. In marketing, observation, identification and description are the phases in which marketers study an industry and its consumers, identify pain points and describe a scenario where their product or service is positioned as the ideal solution. The experimental investigation phase is strategizing and executing on different marketing approaches to find a winning method, and the theoretical explanation, ideally, is that your product or service is the premier solution to your target’s pain points.
Regardless of industry, product or service, methodology, strategy and execution are far more important to the success of your marketing strategy than creative thinking.
Like all sciences, marketing relies heavily on data collected through observation.
Companies that spend more time analyzing data to influence marketing decisions are able to make more educated predictions than companies that rely less on data and more on creative approaches.
We all know the key to a winning marketing strategy is knowing your target market like the back of your hand. The more you know (the more data you collect) the better positioned you are to influence consumer behaviors, and move customers to the ‘loyalty’ phase of the customer lifecycle. In 2023, data collection goes far beyond knowing your targets’ age, gender, and geographical location.
The amount of categories in which companies collect data about consumers has skyrocketed over the past decade, as has the number of tools companies can use to collect data, and the number of businesses built solely around data collection and analysis. Now, companies are able to obtain data about incredibly niche behaviors, like what time of day you go to the gym, how much you spend on leisure activities, if you have a dog, and so much more.
There are aspects of marketing that require creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking, but marketing is much more of a science than it is an artform.
The better you observe, identify, and describe the behavioral patterns of your consumers, the more you’re able to make informed predictions, and test marketing theories rooted in education to land at your final explanation (or marketing approach).