The entire animal kingdom is wired to rely on certain traits. Deer run when they hear a loud noise; sharks naturally move towards the scent of blood. Of course, animals don’t analyse these kinds of automatic reactions - they don’t need to ask why they smell blood, or why they run. For millions of years, they have simply acted in these ways because their chances of survival are heightened.
Humans are different: thanks to the complexity of our brains, we have been blessed (or cursed) with the ability to question the reasons for our actions. Our animalistic instincts, meanwhile, lie beneath the surface, ready to spring into action in times of crisis. Surely this state - a combination of nurtured rationality and natural reactions - must be the ideal way to live?
I’ve come to think not: at least, not when it comes to the world of marketing.
We have never been confronted with so many different ways to process and learn from our judgments. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, data surrounds us. (This is literally true in the rise of wearable health and fitness trackers). One might think that by now, with decades of technological advancement behind us, the logical, analytical part of our brains would be making almost all our daily decisions, including our marketing strategies, aided by a constant stream of data. However, this simply isn’t true.
Too frequently, the rational part of the brain succumbs to the influence of instinct. Look at the language we use to describe acting on hunches at work: “I felt it in my bones”; “it was a gut decision”. Even at the highest levels, marketing directors routinely make important decrees based on nothing more than their feelings. While I’m not suggesting that we should be ruthless statistical zombies with our digital efforts, it stands to reason that more informed choices can be made through appraisal of data before structuring our strategies.
The perplexing thing is that many people and organisations are already doing this, and have been for some time. Billy Beane, of ‘Moneyball’ fame, notably built a hugely overperforming baseball team by looking at raw statistics and determining which players represented the best value for money - disregarding the natural instincts that are often held up as vital within the environs of professional sport. At the other end of the scale, you have massive mergers where due diligence processes can take months and cost millions. Every cog of a business is inspected, and every possible consequence and eventuality is accounted for.
Despite this, though, we are often reluctant to restrict ourselves to ‘just’ looking at data. Depressing though it may be, I’d argue that part of this is simply down to arrogance in marketers. Intuition is seen as sacrosanct, and this attitude is particularly prevalent in the upper echelons of agencies, where individuals trust their own competence purely because of their past successes. However, with the proliferation of big data technologies that pervade every aspect of business, there has never been a better time to act against instinct, and begin to give data a far more prominent role in making digital marketing decisions.
Digital entrepreneur Sri Sharma has said that “data is only an insight, not an answer”. This may be true to some extent, but companies are leveraging scalable big data to help agencies make better decisions. There is no question that in 2015, can provide more of an answer than ever.
By David Benigson, CEO of Signal.
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