Years ago I was speaking at a marketing conference and somebody in the audience asked me what the biggest challenge facing marketers was. I said “a lack of rigor”. Yup. Not the challenge of measuring return on investment, or positioning the brand, or convincing leadership to spend more money. Instead, just simply “rigor”. Marketing is an industry that is particularly representative of the intellectual and physical laziness that has befallen us all. We are an industry of ill-trained professionals who have the profound responsibility to guide our clients in their investment of billions of dollars in order to motivate consumers and businesses to spend billions of dollars, which it turns out is the primary act that drives the growth of our Gross Domestic Product. So effectively ill-trained people are in charge of our economy. Yikes.
The marketing industry is one of the few if only professional service industries that lacks any form of accreditation. Anybody can dispense marketing advice. And they do. To make matters worse many of the people that enter our business do so because they perceive it to be “fun”; they enter it without any relevant academic pedigree, and they enter it viewing the task of “ongoing study” and “intellectual rigor” as anathema.
The result of all this is an industry that has plummeted in perceived value; an industry that has lost the trust of the clients it serves; an industry that is the first to go when a recession appears and the last to come back when good times return. The result is a terrible track record of bandwagons that went bust. The industry declaring new approaches, new media, new tactics as the panacea of all ills, and doing so without any clear understanding of how any of it works, how any of it applies to their specific clients. Why? Because of a lack of rigor.
As example, the last few years have brought the declaration that traditional media no longer works and that the online milieu does, or works better. The flaw with that platitude is that no one ever knew whether traditional media worked(s). So what are we comparing online media too? And even in the online realm there are a dearth of quantitative cases to show how it delivers tangibly better performance and/or performance that is scalable. The entire topic and our industry’s ability to declare anything “for sure” about it is thwarted by a gaping lack of analytical and intellectual rigor, made worse by a gaping hole of data.
If we are to deliver real value (see prior posts) we have to have real insight. And real (and applicable) insight only comes from study and controlled experimentation. Einstein’s theories were not the result of immaculate conception. They were the result of heavy and painful pondering which yielded hypotheses that then were tested in some form or another. If we are to turn around our economy we have to get consumers buying again. If we are to get consumers buying again we have to be better at motivating them to do so, which means being better at understanding exactly how to do that. And that understanding can only come from one thing: relentless intellectual pursuit, from rigor.
Amen.
In the same way an era of ideology seems to have given way to an era of pragmatism in American politics, it’s time for the ad business to subordinate it’s almighty gut in favor of the facts.
The result needn’t be a war on creativity. The creative people I’ve admired most always have more than one idea. What’s required is some discipline in choosing among ideas, based on real observations of what’s working and what isn’t in the world as it is.
Without objection, I will quote from this in the next in a series I am writing on an adjacent topic — tangential but not unrelated.
In particular I love the concept of “the equal and opposite reaction” which is manfiest in the form of zeal directed at the new media (the religious “right,” as in I am and you’re not, of the marketing scene today). I find the new media interesting, but they are only new media. They don’t change the missing skill of defining how any medium (including a new one) fits (or doesn’t) with my compelling (or non-) promise to deliver value.
I know it’s double speak but I also know you get it.
“So effectively ill-trained people are in charge of our economy. Yikes.” Couldn’t agree more.
The two things that marketing is all about is creativity and rigor. However, it sure seems like they’re both in short supply. I won’t claim to have a magic formula for creativity (although it’s probably pretty close to the magic formula for humor– set an expectation and then violate it), but rigor is just discipline. Anybody can do it, but most people don’t choose to.
As an ex-McKinsey guy who spent the last few years running a B2B magazine, I was struck by how the best thinking came out of the smallest, most unassuming shops in places like Alabama and South Dakota. I had been assuming that the big agencies had a talent problem, but what they really have is a development problem. They’re not run on a meritocratic basis (at least that I can see), they’re not rigorous in their thinking, so everyone just pushes flavor of the month. (Does a tractor company really need to be Twittering?) Very few people seem to believe in what they’re doing, so you get safe, lazy thinking. They get perfectly bright people in the door, but they don’t develop them. Hence the revolving door, and the mediocre stay. I don’t see how anyone could do great work at a big agency.
We have a cultural problem in this industry– we’ve been lazy. That’s why Marketing is not respected in CEO suites. We’ve allowed it to be defined as picking Pantone colors and logo fonts, not being rigorous and being able to prove ROI (everyone else has to…)
The sooner we all embrace rigor, the sooner this economy recovers. And I’m only half-joking.