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...