The word “science” can evoke an odd assortment of sensory fantasies in our minds—eccentric-looking individuals draped in white lab coats craning their necks over powerful microscopes or crouched over odd, diabolical-looking pieces of equipment, fiddling with dials and switches that emit strange crackling and buzzing sounds. A slight antiseptic smell wafts through the air. Chalk boards (yep, that shows our ages) marked with inscrutable mathematical equations hang silently from the walls. Yet we also realize that science gives birth to various applied disciplines of technology that infuse our lives with miraculous medicines, time-saving machines, and some really cool gadgets such as a new triathlon-watch with GPS, heart monitor, running pace, bike cadence, swimming stroke, and VO2-Max indicators.
The word “marketing” conjures different images: deadlines, sales quotas, advertising schedules, conferences, conventions, and meetings ... seemingly unending meetings—certainly nothing as romantic as receiving the Nobel Prize or patenting a lifesaving drug.
Yet, marketing is also a science as well as an applied discipline. Knowing why will actually help you improve the quality of your judgments and make more rational decisions than you would otherwise.1 Let’s explore why this is the case.
Clearly, marketing is an applied discipline. It is “applied” because marketers use the principles of marketing—often introduced in one’s first college marketing class—to fashion and shape the “marketing mix.” Oldies but goodies like the 4 Ps, that’s what marketers do. Marketing is also a “discipline” because it contains an organized body of knowledge and an ongoing research program at universities around the world. It’s what marketing professors do.
But does having an organized body of knowledge and ongoing research make marketing a “science?” After all, one could argue that astrology possesses an organized body of knowledge and ongoing research program, but few people would agree that astrology is a “science.”
Defining what is and what is not a “science” is actually quite difficult, and we will not delve into the finer points of that subject in this book. Nonetheless, we offer a preliminary argument that marketing is a science and that knowing something about this science will make you a better marketer and critical thinker.
What aspects of marketing as a science are important for applied marketers to know? Well, there are many, and one of this book’s authors, Terry Grapentine, wrote a treatise on this subject that is part of Business Expert Press’ Marketing Strategy Collection: Applying Scientific Reasoning to the Field of Marketing: Make Better Decisions. Short of giving you a book review, this Think Better piece briefly discusses the following three aspects of marketing as a science that are important for you to know: (1) marketing concepts, models, and metrics; (2) marketing laws; and (3) the scientific way of thinking.
Marketing Concepts, Models, and Metrics
Since another Think Better piece, “What is a Concept?” addressed that topic, let’s address the other two aspects of marketing as a science here: models and metrics.
Marketing models are conceptual or mathematical frameworks that attempt to identify factors called independent variables, which predict a useful marketing outcome variable, such as market share or product sales, also known as a dependent variable. A marketing metric “is a measuring system that quantifies a trend, dynamic, or [market-related] characteristic.”2
Having some familiarity with marketing concepts, models, and metrics is important because they form the premises of marketing arguments. You don’t need to be able to describe them at parties—just keep a good college-level marketing and advertising textbook on your shelf for reference.
Marketing Models
Advertising works in different ways and there are different marketing models that specifically describe this process, including the Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) model, the hierarchy of effects model, the information adoption model, and others.3
For example, the standard learning model is best suited for products where consumers display “high involvement,” such as when they purchase automobiles or other relatively expensive durable goods (products that last a year or more). This model views the customer as an active participant in learning about new products. “Ads for products and services in these areas are usually very detailed and provide customers with information that can be used to evaluate brands and help them make a purchase decision.”4
In contrast, we know of a property casualty insurance company whose advertising efforts are informed by the dissonance/attribution model. One aspect of that model suggests that an important role of advertising is to make customers comfortable about their purchase after the sale (i.e., reduce dissonance) so that they are more likely to renew their policy when it comes up for renewal.
Other kinds of models you may benefit from having a basic familiarity with include:
Marketing mix models that help optimize your allocation of expenditures across different communications media such as television advertising, direct mail, and digital.
Price elasticity models that help to determine the most profitable price for a product.
Innovation and diffusion models that help you identify the early adopters of a new, innovative product.
In all cases, these models and their outputs create, in part, the premises of marketing arguments. And good premises go a long way to convince your audience of your recommendations.
Marketing Metrics
Marketing managers are interested in measuring their organization’s marketing performance over time (the dependent variables discussed earlier) and all factors affecting that performance (independent variables). There are many kinds of metrics to do this. Examples include market penetration, unaided awareness, loyalty, sales force effectiveness, and incremental sales/promotion lift. Paul W. Farris et al. wrote a popular book on this topic called Marketing Metrics: 50 + Metrics Every Executive Should Master.5
Why will you benefit from being familiar with these metrics? Because, as Farris et al. say:
Often, managers must decide whether to seek sales growth by acquiring existing category users from their competitors or by expanding the total population of category users, [by] attracting new customers to the market. Penetration metrics help indicate which of these strategies would be most appropriate and help managers to monitor their success.6
These metrics and their outputs create, in part, the premises of marketing arguments. And good premises help to convince your audience of your recommendations.
Marketing Laws
You may be familiar with some “laws” from the field of physics such as “no object can go faster than the speed of light.” A law is a kind of necessity in nature. Regarding the speed of light, it’s not that objects don’t travel faster than the speed of light; it’s that they can’t—it’s the law!
Marketing has “laws,” too; if it did not, markets would be totally chaotic and unpredictable. Marketing laws are perhaps better characterized as empirical regularities that are probabilistic, not deterministic, in nature.
For example, consider the “user bases seldom vary” law. This law states that “rival brands sell to very similar customer bases.”7 So, the consumer demographics of those who purchase Energizer brand batteries look pretty much the same as consumers who purchase Duracell batteries. But this relationship is not deterministic. Deterministic means that if 20 percent of consumers who purchase the Energizer brand have yearly household incomes of $30,000 or less, then exactly 20 percent of the consumers who purchase the Duracell brand will be in the same income bracket. It is only possible that this will be case and that the actual percentages for both brands will be in the neighborhood of 20 percent, but very unlikely that it will be exactly so.
Why is this law important to know? Because many marketers tend to believe that their situation is unique—that their customers are different from competitors’ customers and that a company needs to develop advertising messages uniquely designed for “our customers.” Research shows that those strategies affect sales far less than would investing time and resources into efforts targeted to all potential customers in a market and increasing the “mental availability” (i.e., salience) of your brand. Byron Sharp discusses this at length in his award-winning book, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know.8 In it, Sharp discusses the nature of 11 different marketing laws and how they affect a brand’s market performance. One of these laws is the “user bases seldom vary law.” Our Think Better piece on the Double Jeopardy law is also one of the 11 marketing laws that Sharp discusses in his book.
The Scientific Way of Thinking
We don’t want to confuse the “the scientific method” with “the scientific way of thinking.” The scientific method (TSM) is typically defined as follows:
Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable, to guard against mistakes or confusion in any particular experiment.9
A good example of TSM is drug studies conducted for FDA approval in which the drug is compared to a placebo or for the treatment of a particular disease.
The scientific way of thinking (TSWT) is much broader than TSM. It’s not a process or procedure, but rather an overarching way of looking at things. Scientific thinking in our field involves such activities as building one’s background knowledge of marketing and the other fields that contribute to marketing knowledge (e.g., behavioral economics), applying good deductive and inductive logic to problem solving, avoiding logical fallacies, developing useful marketing concepts and strong arguments, and building theories that explain and predict marketing phenomenon.10
If marketing is to plow the conceptual field that has so amazingly nurtured scientific discovery, we need to learn how to apply scientific reasoning to solving business problems. This means becoming familiar with some of the critical thinking tools that drive scientific discovery. This goal is not academic. Rather, it is one of the most practical endeavors a marketer can pursue, and might help us avoid making the same kind of mistake [we often read about in publications such as Forbes and The Wall Street Journal].11
Bottom line: The purpose of this book is to help you develop strong and cogent marketing arguments. A critical aspect of this task is to incorporate into your arguments’ premises, relevant marketing concepts, models, and metrics that will give your audience good reasons to believe your recommendations.
But you will be hampered in these efforts unless you strive to build your understanding and knowledge in these subject areas and their unique vocabularies. This is one of the dirty little secrets of critical thinking: Learning how to construct truth-conducive arguments that also persuade your audience to accept your recommendations takes time and effort. No silver bullets here.