My friend and colleague Amartya Bhattacharjy led a roundtable discussion today titled, Merging Art and Science in Marketing at #PBLS11, which I've tried to distill for you here.
He began with the traditional view of marketing in terms of two types of activities that had their own mindsets:
- Brand marketing (mass marketing / not measurable), with the goal to build a brand and establish an emotional connection.
- Direct marketing (highly targeted / measurable), with the objective to generate short-term sales.
Clearly that's a view that's far too simple to apply to today's marketing, but a good starting point nonetheless. While those two examples and their associated objectives exist in marketing today, they are now just two pieces to a much more complex puzzle. Even so, the distinctions are not at all clear and we now have the capability to measure just about anything in marketing. Enter marketing optimization.
Marketing optimization blends art and science because it enables marketers to apply mathematical techniques to maximize campaign return, revealing how to make the most of each customer contact. You can do that by figuring out the best offers for your targets and then also factor in budget, channel capacity and contact policies so you know what to do and also have the mathematically-based reasoning why. Not just for data geeks, marketing optimization also enables you to conduct “what if” scenarios for which you can see the impact of changes to budget, timing, contact policy or any other constraint.
Think of it as enabling you to be “scientifically artful” or “artfully scientific” about your marketing – in either case, it helps improve your marketing. For more details, please visit the SAS Marketing Optimization web page.
