Customer science is just horse shit
Aarron Spinley is a Fellow at the Field Bell Institute. Here, he tackles the increasingly popular argument that customer science is nothing but a steaming load.
I was pressed quite hard the other week. Someone had the temerity to tell me that a scientific approach to managing the customers of a business, is, and I quote, “just horseshit”.
I say, temerity, of course, because I wrote a book on the subject and teach a class on it, so he was having a right old go. But just as you could see the wind really fill their sails and the chest puff out, it all collapsed in a moment. Right after I agreed with him.
Many people get confused by terms like ‘customer science’. They assume it to be some abstract and academic petri dish approach to a field that is full of nuance, culture, and context. Hardly the stuff of zeros and ones, or physics, they say. It wasn’t that long ago that Mark Ritson said: “We’ve been having a debate about whether marketing is science for about 50 years. And the recurring answer is ‘no’”.
Of course, the bedside manner of a doctor represents soft skills, and applied judgement. But the field of medicine is still a science. Conversely, the design of a house relies on physics and mathematics. But the building industry is not generally regarded as a field of science at all. Our application of the term is somewhat, fluid, shall we say. I should hasten to add that Ritson now happily endorses many aspects of marketing science.
But it’s that word, “science”, that perhaps derails perceptions and gets so many all hot and bothered. My earliest training was as a drama student so I’m hardly the proverbial Professor Peabody, but I do find all this misdirection a smidge, well, nonsensical.
What is scientific management? It’s nothing more than evidence-based decision making. That’s it. Lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
Aarron Spinley
It was back in the throes of the post-industrial revolution that a chap called Frederick Taylor gave us the principles of scientific management, both in his 1911 book of the same title, and in his work which is widely regarded as the foundation of Henry Ford’s efficiency triumphs on the production line. Many see his legacy as the breaking down of jobs into distinct tasks, timing them, and re-designing the process to be faster, and leaner. But they miss the point of Taylor’s work. He was much more broadly concerned with using proven established positions, true data, to inform practice, and decision making overall. You can argue if you like, but it was his book – and that was his title.
Not a petri dish in sight.
Later, the same underlying principles would go on to provide the foundation of quality management systems, which emerged as post-world war two Japan sought to recover its economy. Still no petri dish.
So, what is customer science, then? It’s simply the evidence-based methods for managing a customer base, in the same way that its papa bear, marketing science, provides a body of evidence used in the pursuit of the wider market.
In marketing’s case, this fits beautifully in and around and over and under the classical marketing sequence, borne of the sweat of industrialists, economists, and scholars, and given life at Harvard University in the 1950s. There are many aspects of course, from the Ehrenberg Bass concepts of market penetration via mental and physical availability, to the application of excess share of voice, and off into multi-media mix research, and so on. As the data grows, and as the evidence solidifies, piece by piece, practice is so informed. This is scientific management.
Still no petri dish
Of course, down the corridor, there is a customer team.
While many laws and “law-like” patterns discovered by marketing research institutions are informative as to the nature of a customer base as an economic asset, your typical “CX” department will be a million miles from this type of critical theory.
Invariably, you’ll find them busy drinking the Kool-Aid of the feedback industry in a vain attempt to manage an asset after the fact, while the marketing technology (‘martech’) team – some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet – might nevertheless be lost in the latest wormhole debate about composable CDPs and some mystical formula for attribution. Elsewhere, we still see contact centre managers huddled around a customer journey “map” that inexplicably begins with an inbound call, and retail leaders being sold loyalty concepts from those who still think points and rewards, aren’t the colossal drain on corporate profits they’ve been proven to be.
These are all really good people that can deliver so much more and, frankly, deserve so much better from their careers. So, yeah. Customer science. But if you can’t handle that word, ‘evidence-based management of the customer base’. Better?
Meanwhile, marketers are being increasingly asked to take on the customer space – just look at the capability maps at marketing associations – but don’t know where to start. Oh, and there are important intersections between marketing and customering, but I can’t begin to go there, and neither can your CMO until the… ahem, science, is better understood.
But now you’re wondering why I agreed with the dude who said it’s just horseshit.
Well, at the risk of being the first to write about pony faeces on Mumbrella, this is simply the waste that the body dispels after the digestive system has processed food and kept for itself the necessary nutrients.
You know how we know that? Science.
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