I always enjoy what Seth Godin has to say, and often he stimulates me to see something in a new way. But yesterday’s post just left me scratching my head.
It started out by stating that Marketing is both Art and Science, but then concluded that marketers “can only wear one hat at a time.”
Seth suggested that both outsiders and marketers are confused because marketers don’t know when to be scientific and when to be artistic. Does it have to be that way?
He also pointed out that humans are the wild card in the system. Are they the wild card, or simply another factor in the system that’s important to understand?
Let’s add another element, Psychology, to the mix and see if the pieces make for a cohesive whole.
But before diving into the relationship between Art, Science and Psychology in Marketing, let’s be clear on our goals.
The purpose of B2B Marketing is to help your organization find, win and keep customers. It does this by creating value for buyers at every stage of the buyer’s process in a way that is profitable for you. To be effective, marketers have to be creative, systematic, and persuasive using Art, Science, and Psychology.
Art
It’s an art to communicate your ideas to customers in a way that they can understand, remember, and act upon.
It’s not just getting their attention (that’s the easy part), it’s keeping attention long enough to show the alignment between your ideas and the problem they are trying to solve. A great resource to improve your ability to communicate your ideas is Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick. It shows how anyone can nurture ideas by applying six principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional, and stories.
Science
Art is necessary, but so is accountability and results.
To be effective, to know where you are and where you are going, Marketing needs a framework. It needs to measure it’s results and to understand cause and effect. This all requires a scientific approach where you make a hypothesis and devise ways to test it.
I’ve found the Toyota Production System and Lean approach to process improvement to be the best guide for systematically improving Marketing results. The general principles are described in Jim Womack’s book Lean Thinking and on his Lean Enterprise Institute website at MIT. To apply the ideas of Lean and process improvement to Marketing and Sales, see Michael Webb’s book Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way and his website Sales Performance.
Psychology
Marketers want to persuade potential buyers that their interests and your organization’s abilities are aligned, that you know how to solve the kinds of problems they are experiencing. They want to build rapport and trust so that buyers are willing to be influenced to take action.
Persuading buyers to overcome their inertia and move forward with solving their problem is challenging, but fortunately a lot of good research on the subject has been done. The first book for the layperson on the subject was Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
More recently Cialdini updated his material and published Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. If you want a more condensed education in how to be more persuasive, try Blair Warren’s paper The One-Sentence Persuasion Course.
Art, Science, and Psychology reinforce each other in a Marketing system. It’s a system that incorporates all three, that creates value for the buyer, that is profitable for you, and that can be constantly improved.
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