Marketers have tended to be oriented toward applied experience with a dose of storytelling. But a profession does not advance through opinion. It advances through building knowledge.
So year one, I told you your profession was medieval. Year two, I said you were too busy to fix it. Year three, I said you weren’t really a profession.
The good news is I’m running out of ways to insult marketers
This year, I want to take the next leap forward.
Because here is the crazy thing: A lot of the knowledge already exists
We’re just not universally applying it.
The uncomfortable part is that marketing has not consistently and pervasively made scientific knowledge a part of our process.
This is not a call to just go discover new insights — although a lot of that work still needs to continue, and that is a major focus at the Marketing + Media Alliance and our Think Tanks.
This is a call to codify what’s already been proven and start applying it. Make a commitment, as I said last year, to scientific principles.
It is time to end the Age of Opinion in marketing
And that brings us back to the real issue.
I’ve said this before, one of the elements of a profession is a codified body of knowledge—one that practitioners learn, believe in, and build on top of.
The closest thing marketing has is the book Empirical Generalizations About Marketing Impact by Dr. Dominique Hanssens at UCLA, and published by Marketing Science Institute. It was last updated in 2015.
It haw 125 empirical generalizations that were based on around 10,000 research papers. It is, as academics call it, SETTLED knowledge.
Now the challenge is, I have never met a marketer who knew about the book, let alone read it.
I’ve asked marketers about this book for 10 years. The most common response is a polite pause and a change of subject.
So let me give you three examples of the kind of knowledge that’s in there .
Ad spend increases won’t create a surge in sales
The median payoff on a 10% increase in ad spend is a 0.5% lift in sales
That’s it. Note, that is 0.5% sales, but not profit.
And it’s been declining every decade since 1960. But here’s what most brands miss: as I said earlier, we don’t or didn’t know the long-term effect for each of our brands.
Advertising’s output isn’t an immediate sale— it’s a mental state that delivers long term. The challenge is we can’t tell the CFO the financials of that long term investment
Until now. More in a minute.
Note though, most academic research suggests that advertising is one of the least valuable elements in the marketer’s tool kit, versus product, pricing, even sales, and more.
Promotions won’t help you grow
75 cents of every dollar spent on promotion goes to stealing customers from a competitor who is spending to steal yours right back.
Only 10 cents of that dollar actually grows the category. For many brands, your heaviest users, are major switchers.
Promotions don’t build demand—they redistribute it.
At scale, this is maybe the most expensive stalemate in business.
