IBM’s Jarther Taylor: marketing without data is medieval
Marketing that relies on instinct without using data is “medieval”, according to IBM marketer Jarther Taylor.
Taylor, associate partner, IBM Global Business Services said in an interview with Mumbrella that it was “unacceptable” for marketers to work “on hunches”.
The interview with Mumbrella comes shortly after IBM released a global study of chief marketing officers, which found that social media ranks as among their lowest priorities.
Taylor called marketers’ disinclination towards social media “astounding”.
Couldn’t agree more. Well said Jarther.
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Hear hear – brilliant!
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marketers have always used data.
this is just scare mongering from a company vested in the idea of pushing marketers to pay for data services.
boring
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Thanks Chris. Have yet to go through the embarrassment of watching myself on video. Perhaps after a couple of drinks tonight.
All – if you want to get a copy of the global CMO study, you can click through to register via the IBM Global Business Services website http://www.ibm.com/gbs/au
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Very good points, but a good marketer still needs to have a good “gut feel” for their work. I remember seeing a preso from one of EURO RSCG’s honchos once where he said 80% of all the information a marketer needs to make a decision is in their data, but the last 20% is instinct and acumen. I feel that holds true.
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Couldn’t agree more – everything needs to be backed up. Hunches are old school
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It’s a combo of both – hunches and data.
Too often data is relied on as a cover your arse type tool. “it tested well”, so when it fails no-one points the finger.
Data is important, but marketing is not a science – much of it still is based on gut feel – in many ways a lot of it is still an art.
Also as #3 wow factor put it, these surveys such as the CMO survey are marketing exercise designed to get some PR, hopefulyl position IBM as a though leader, yada yada yada
[edited by Mumbrella]
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In reality there is some interplay between the two.
“Hunches” is just another word for “Hypotheses” and are great starting points as long as data substantiates them. And analysis of the data can inspire hunches.
With so much data available today only arrogant fools would refuse to use it to make themselves, and their work, smarter.
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I’ll be honest, I’m more of the “vaguely right” than “precisely wrong” school of thought.
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Marketing on data is all well and good, but without the ‘human factor’, expect a sanitised, formulaic future.
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I don’t think this is about doing away with the human creative element. It’s more about ensuring that what we do links to well founded business objectives. That way everybody wins!
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Sorry but I’m getting a bit bored with all this “Data is the new Black” theme.
I may have only worked on this business for 25 years but I can’t remember any marketer that I’ve worked with making any decisions without reference to either quantitative or qualitative information (let’s call this data) during the process.
Having said that I’ve known many situations where following this analysis they could have made any one of a number of decisions, all supported by the data.
Which one they’ve made could well have have come to “it just feel like the right thing to do”, so if this is intuition or a hunch, then so be it. They’ve made it, and they then have to live with the outcomes.
Having said that the world has changed in these past 25 years and the amount of data available can be overwhelming. However, I believe that it can be managed by sticking to the fundamental broad data sets:
1) The market;
2) The company or brand;
3) The customer / consumer;
4) Marketing effort.
Sometimes, keeping it simple still works, even today.
And by the way, as we all know, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, so the chances of them having made the right decision, having used data or not, is kind of irrelevant, when the real world determines outcomes most of the time.
The only other perspective I’d add to this debate is that so much of the data collected currently is too old to really mean anything by the time it reaches a decision maker’s desk or device – that’s probably why social media (monitoring, listening & responding) is becoming more important – it’s real-time data (the Qantas situation is turning into the perfect case study on this as we speak).
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