If you search for”marketing level” in Google, you will find that there is a lot of confusion about whether the subject is an art or a science. At some Colleges like Essex, Portsmouth, and Worcester, the level qualifies as a Batchelor of their Arts and yet, at other establishments like Newcastle, Bournemouth and Lancaster, you can earn yourself a Batchelor of Science.
This split at a marketer’s beginnings are amplified once from the profession. Many would assert that marketers connect with the client with their creative flair. However, with the prevalence of technologies and software that is devoted to marketing, others suggest that the profession has become more science than art.
The fact is, in order to stay on top of tough competition, the growing expectations of an increasingly digital consumer, and ever tighter budgets; creativity alone is no longer enough.
Measuring Art
Among the biggest facets of marketing is becoming the brain of the consumer and understanding their behaviour. The old understanding of advertising being the group who fear about the color of the emblem is outdated — the art of marketing is to make sure we deliver on the brand promise.
In a market that is saturated and noisy, marketing is fundamental to being noticed — and this is all about creative. Ultimately, it is not science that connects emotionally with a consumer, but creativity and artwork. It’s clear that using this to create a brand requires some creativity and artistic talent; however, specifying the reach and effect of your campaigns requires science.
Aligning into the business
Additionally, increasing requirements on funding means the craft of marketing is needing to align to the demands of the company. The core question from the marketing department and indeed the rest of the business will always remain — is our marketing powerful, and also do the results justify the spend?
This is the area where science can support us. Marketing should be seen as the intersection between mathematics and creativity in the pursuit of business goals. The most recent marketing tools and measurement methods are enabling entrepreneurs to do so by making direct links between enhancing the brand and sales results.
Crunching the creative amounts
In the era of the networked economy, it’s no secret that the current customer is getting more and more digitally savvy — what in our private and professional lives is connected and tracked. It’s been estimated that by 2020 there’ll be 2.5 billion links between individuals on social networks, and 75 billion connections between appliances, smartphones, manufacturing equipment and wearable technology.
This explosion in connections is generating substantial volumes of information, which is getting more deeply embedded in our own lives — average doubling every 18 months. It is inevitable; the networked economy – and large data – is another revolution in marketing. A 2014 report found that 43% of marketers in the united kingdom are already’mining’ petabytes of client information to extract client insights, and a further 40% plan to invest in Big Data over the next three decades.
By using data this way, marketers can make the most of science to understand the crucial topics of interest to their audience, and align their creative to this in order to create the most effect and, basically, Return on Investment to the business.
One can drive the other
Marketing afterward, is both an art and a science. Lots of aspects of marketing can not be quantified — the creative, artistic and emotional connections that we so carefully craft together with our audience. However, employing the growing volumes of customer information to extract insight on those crowds, and predict what they will want – before they know themselves in order to drive that demand, that’s science. The successful marketers will be those who bring the artistic and scientific strengths together so as to fuel innovation, get buy from the rest of the organization, and are rewarded with tangible, measurable results.
