Marketing - science or art?

I had a thought at the weekend that marketing is a science and is no longer art. Actually what I thought was marketing is a science now, what did it used to be? But this led me to think about how marketing has evolved and I believe that this is largely down to the online channel. When I first started working, marketing was all about telling the customer what the latest message from a company was. This meant that the relevance to and interest of the customer, was not taken in to account. What was important was telling that message and making it look nice. Well, brand like anyway, nice is a very subjective word.

And it was all about using all the channels and methods that marketing afforded, whatever worth they had. What it was not about was targeting the customer with something interesting and relevant to them. It was not about channeling the right message through the right method. It was certainly not about measuring the impact and using that information to drive refinement and ultimately better marketing.

The advent of the online channel as a marketing tool has changed this. Ads could be targeted at the (as) right (as possible)audience because you placed the ad on a website which was relevant to your message. Those ads could have a tag placed on them so you could measure the impact. Check that out! Measure the impact! Of course that meant that businesses had to start thinking about what they wanted to achieve out of their marketing activity - how controversial.

There was email, not strictly online, more direct marketing, but the principle of targted emailing became important. The content had to start becoming relevant to the consumer of that content otherwise you wouldn't get your open rates. Ah, open rates! Another measurement.

Online conversions became a buzz word, measuring the impact of your messages on your website sales. Well well ...

It is fair to say that direct marketing tried by having for example, codes which would be quoted on calling the business in hand in order for that business to understand if there was a conversion and if so, where it came from. Which is great, but hard to implement, let's face it.

Online, on the other hand, not so difficult. In fact, wherever I have worked, I have been asked to provide numbers - visitors, uniques, page impressions, pages etc etc ... and why? Not because the numbers were used for anything but because it was expected and it wasn't hard to do. Not so for the other channel marketers.

And as time has gone on, online measurement has become an art in itself. Or do I mean science? Yes, science, definitely. And one which can be looped in to the rest of the business to understand the impact as a whole. Which has ultimately meant that other marketing channels are having to do the same. And with this information, it is expected that marketers are able to refine and improve their communications and activities, because they know what works and what doesn't.

I don't deny that brand is important in this. You have to be identified in some way and the creative you underpin the scientific methodology with, is all important. But the creative can not drive the decision as to what activity, which audience, which message, and where. For marketing to work these days, it has to be clever. It has to understand what has worked in the past and how well it worked. It's the science behind the numbers that should do that and that is where it should start. So yes, marketing is primarily a science. Or rather, the art of science should be applied to marketing...

Customer services not experience

We are having a really bad experience at the moment. In fact, this is the second time this has happened since we moved here (3 years ago) with the same company. And no lessons appear to have been learnt from the last time this happened. This is a service we pay for yes, but more than that it is a service which is offered by the provider, therefore it is their responsibility. Ok, the service is broadband and is provided by a pretty long in the tooth telco. But this is not about them per se, and it doesn’t matter what the service it; this is about how they should help their customer, not hinder them.

The first time this happened, it took 6 weeks to resolve. At first it was deemed our fault by the provider. But it was not our fault and when we did everything they told us to, at great expense and time to us, the problem still occurred. Time and money had flown past, many people were spoken to and it eventually took one person, with a little bit of initiative and presence of mind, to resolve the issue. So now we have the same problem, only this time exacerbated by the fact that customer services is based in India. I am all for globalisation, but when customer services is so far removed from the country of origin, the only way it will work efficiently, is to ensure that strict processes are followed to the letter. There is no allowance for proactivity or deviation from process to ensure that something gets resolved. And I do understand that strict processes need to be put in place, but it doesn’t help me as a customer. And that is what I want, help. From the organisation that we pay, to provide us with the service they sold to us.

We went through the same thing all over again, (at our cost and time) and none of this has resolved the issue. But try telling that to customer services, all they want to do is follow process and they certainly do not want to spend any money sending someone out. We even said we would pay a £1000 to have someone come to our house to help us, but no, it didn’t follow process, wasn’t scripted, therefore couldn’t happen. And there is no manager to talk to in order to escalate the matter. And there is no phone number on the providers website to direct you somewhere other than customer services in India. This is not the fault of the poor people having to deal with us, very angry by now after 3 weeks of this, they are doing their job as they have been told to do. But it is the customer that suffers. And it doesn’t matter where these customer services agents are, if they do not understand how to help, they will not be able to do anything.

This is a painful experience. Only through searching forums did we find a name and address of someone to write to in order to complain and then apparently if you are not satisfied you go to Ofcom. It should never get that far. In order to achieve a customer experience beyond just polite customer service, agents should be proactive enough to deviate from standard script, they should have the power to do more and fight for their customer, they should ultimately be able to close the loop. Unfortunately this takes time, training and money and probably some substantial organisational change, physically and in attitude. Surely it is worth it to ensure that the customer gets a simple thing like help? Beyond that, the provider’s processes are clearly too complex because even the agents don’t know how to handle a complaint, or a long-standing issue; they don’t know who to turn to themselves for resolution.

Most of all though, help is simply not at hand. No-one understand what the problem is, no-one sees that this had been going on long enough, no-one shares our frustration that this isn’t being resolved. A better customer experience would be to not provide broadband at all, because it is clearly an issue here. And that is what I was told by another provider, that they simply wouldn’t supply it because we would have such a poor experience. At least then you know where you stand.

Everything is just far too complicated and too big these days, for customers to get their heads round and for organisations to deal with and deliver a satisfying customer experience.

A lot of noise and no sense? Social marketing

There is a lot of noise out there on the internet. A lot. I am trying to fathom a plan to rise above that noise, be heard and make sense to customers. Everyone is talking about social, wisdom of the crowd, the people's internet and in return organisations are trying to tap in to this by creating more noise in all those places where the crowds are gathering, talking, discussing, spouting off, showing off. Widgets by the thousands are appearing, api's, aggregator services, more and more social sites, rss sites.



My main concern when thinking up this plan of attack on social media, is trying to understand why people use these sites. Yes, there is an initial excitement when you spend a lot of time setting up your profile, choosing that all essential picture and best of all, picking your 'friends'. And let's not forget the hours trawling through all the widgets and api's which you can add to your profile, the groups you can join and the messages you send to those friends who haven't yet (really, haven't yet?) joined one of these sites and then wait anxiously until they accept your invitation. The next few weeks are spent going back to the site to check if you have any new messages from these friends ... and there isn't anything so you change your profile picture and your current status (which you leave for weeks because you have forgotten to change it back). Until you realise that actually, nothing ever really happens, you don't really want to look at that friends new uni pictures (drunk again) and well, you can't be bothered to leave messages for your friends because they don't send one back.


Then someone asks if you are a twit ... sorry, a twitter, so you join, update your whereabouts a few times and start to question why you are doing this, after all if you are meeting someone, they know where you are, if you have left your house chances are, whoever you live with knows where you are going and if you have a stalker, well why would you want them to know where you are.

I joined Rummble the other day. And a couple of days later I got a slightly obscure and weird email from a slightly obscure and weird person talking about Staines, the town. Why do I want to get emails from random people I don't know, when I spend all day sorting through work emails and emails from random people I do know? And what on earth do I have to say about Staines? I have driven through there once, and got lost. Maybe he thinks I own it because of my name? The witty part of me would reply to him and say 'I know, it's my town, I own it' but well, it's not very funny and it's simply not true. Oh yes, and I don't have the time; aside from emails I have a raft of to do's: online banking, online credit card payments, online shopping ... and writing this blog.

The slightly cynical way in which I talk about these things is because all these things seem really fly by night. Do they really enhance people's lives? What is wrong with seeing your friends face to face, a phone call or at worst, an email?


I have had some success with social stuff; I got in contact through LinkedIn with an business partner of old and now we are working together on a project. But actually that is all at the moment. Maybe I am not using it effectively, but these are the things I should know about using so am I right in thinking that it's all going over the top and is no longer useful or fun or am I in a minority?

The problem I have is that the bandwagon has been jumped on and everyone is now talking about social marketing. But is this really any different to paid for search engine marketing; after all you are still, as a business, trying to get your voice heard amongst a lot of noise.

But let's face it, all the statistics out there show that this is still a growing trend and not likely to stop. People enjoy it and it seems that people are once again forming communities around them, just like the old village communities that existed back in the hey day when there were no cars, public transport etc and people lived and died by their community and only this community they knew. Which is no bad thing, and it happens to be online which gives organisations the opportunity to get involved.

But when organisations get involved in this they need to get it right. There is little point in creating more noise and confusion. Use the tools well and you will see a return - through brand engagement and customers engaging with you more and more and therefore including you in their lives. For example, don't force users to visit a different site when doing a viral campaign on Facebook. Keep it within the destination the customer has chosen to go. Make it compelling enough to be included in the customer's online social life and by dint of that, their friends/community, don't make it just another sell.

Be social with your customers and give them reason to socialise with you without making them feel the benefit is all yours.

Be responsive to the talk that is out there about your organisation, react to it, don't let it fester and therefore prove to customers that they are right in being negative about you (as this will more often than not be the case, but positive feedback should be responded to also).

There's lots more but it's all about being involved in the right way and enhancing the overall experience your customer has of you as a brand - journey with the customer, don't create new journeys for them.