Is marketing a science or an art?

Question: During our strategic planning two months ago, in his presentation of the marketing plan, my marketing director said that with the start next year of Asean integration and the coming stiffer competition in our FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) markets, we should prepare for the commoditization of our product lines. His marketing plan therefore focused on lower prices and lots of promotions.

As president, I disagreed. I pointed out that his plan did not present any market facts and data on each of our two FMCG product lines to show the basis for the commoditization trend he was basically just assuming. This absence of evidence also applies to his other assumption that lower pricing and promotions will work in place of positioning or repositioning.

I finished college as an engineer and I learned from my sales experience at Procter & Gamble that every major strategic direction or redirection must be supported by “science.” When I left P&G for a brand management position in a large but local FMCG company, my planning mind-set was reinforced. I retained that way of planning as I worked my way up to become president.

I vetoed the marketing plan and asked for a revised plan. When I got the revised plan, it was basically a rehash of last year’s. I then called my marketing director, who came with our national sales director. During the discussion, both argued that this coming year’s market scenario called for the “art” and not the “science” of marketing and sales. They said they learned this from your column. Is this true? Did you actually tell them in one of your columns that marketing is an art and not a science?

Both science and art

Answer: I’m glad you wrote because that meant you still see me as an ally and someone in the science of marketing and not in the art of it.

But let me tell you up front where I stand on the issue behind your question. I believe that marketing is both a science and an art, and you use it either way as the need requires.

I learned this insight not from a marketing authority but from my cardiologist, Dr. Ramon Abarquez, a medical scientist of world renown. About two years ago, Dr. Abarquez asked me to recall how I was able to survive and even lived long and well after my 1994 quintuple bypass. I remember thanking him and medical science most of all. Dr. Abarquez was quick to correct my impression.

He said it was only 20 percent him and medical science but 80 percent was due to my art, my discipline of taking good care of myself. Dr. Abarquez went on to say that with all its advancement and new technologies, medical science remains an inexact science.

He continued: “With every major laboratory test, what is it that I tell you after my diagnosis and prescription? I’ve always told you to get a second opinion. If medical science is an exact science, will a second opinion be necessary?” That’s wisdom coming from an appreciation of the synergy in using both science and art.

And so it must be in marketing. When you’re into planning and strategy formulation, you’re less likely to go wrong if you talk more science than art. Be data-based. Analyze by both zooming in on the details and zooming out to the bigger picture. But when you’re into implementing and in the here-and-now, you’re better off taking up marketing more as an art than a science. Rely on your intuition and what your right brain tells you. Be charming, smile a lot.

After P&G and when you worked as a brand manager, I think marketing science helped you more than its art. This must have been particularly true when you were into new product planning and launching. Your target market segmenting study, your brand positioning research and your new product testing made you confident about how you will attain your market share objectives and pursue your competitive strategies.

Even though you knew that your actual market and customers were never exactly going to be your target market and customers, your market segmentation study helped you feel surer about setting your market segment priorities. And from your positioning research, you somehow knew what were of truer value to your target customers about your new product and how to make it stand above its two or three leading competitors.

Then your product testing made you understand what to reinforce in your new product’s strong points as its target customers saw them, and what to avoid.

You also learned if and how the new product’s consumer-defined competitor diverges or converges with your marketer-defined competitor. For all these, there were very little remaining insights to derive from the art of marketing.

But you have been with and in sales. In dealing with your retail accounts, for example, you must have known that in talking to a retail account about changes initiated by either you or your retail client, there often was little time or need to invoke the help of the latest data and other science-based sales and marketing aids. It often was your past experience with the art of selling and marketing that became your best sources of insights for effectively negotiating about changes with regard to shelf space allocation, in-store promos, shelf talkers, pricing and discounts, inventories and deliveries, and such other related supplier-store relationship matters.

Differentiation

Several of my clients say that this differentiation was true when the computer wasn’t around yet. Current computer technologies are making available to both sales and marketing, analyses as well as raw data to help make quick here-and-now decisions. It had been pointed out that we now have access to powerful global “big data.” In a previous column, we saw that this fascination with “big data” is simply that, a fascination. We ended by taking the side of those who concluded that “to make real sense, big data require big analysis.” Data like computers cannot speak for themselves except for what they have been wired to do.

So there’s my answer to your question if I actually said that marketing is an art and not a science. It’s both. Use its science in effectively planning and strategy formulating. Use its art in efficiently executing plans and strategies. Keep your questions coming. Send them to me at [email protected].