The Truth About Marketing Science

What is the meaning of Marketing Science?

Is Marketing Art or Science?

Is using Data enough?

"It's complicated," "both," and "no" are the answers in chronological order. But let's go a bit more into the details.

The Marketing Science Truth

Marketing Science is an industry-made-up term to halo more scientific rigor to a business function that clearly lacks it. But despite its perceived coolness, as reflected in the number of LinkedIn profiles using the term, Marketing Science is not trending in Google Searches.

In the real world, it's not cool to search for Marketing Science.

Also, when you search for the term "Science" on Wikipedia, the fantastic article that explains what science means has zero mentions of Marketing.

The Art and Science of Marketing

Similarly, I don't think Marketing is any art.

Advertising development could be seen as an art form, but Marketing is much more than that.

Marketing is all about diagnosis, strategy, and execution. And advertising is just one small part of the execution.

Always have this impressive visualization from "The Proper Marketing Club" at arm's length. It will elevate your practice beyond Communications.

It must be data, big data, then.

It is cool to "create" a new science in contemporary times.

But only because data plays a more critical role in marketing decisions doesn't mean we are doing any scientific work here.

Just using data doesn't make marketing a science.

When we think of sciences, we almost always refer first to physics, math, or biology. But what brings them together? What is their glue?

It's the use of the scientific method. This played the most significant role in humanity's knowledge creation from the 17th century when it was first mentioned. The scientific method is a practical way of acquiring knowledge by careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, formulating hypotheses, and robust measurement.

So unless the scientific method is the only way to make marketing decisions, marketing can't be called a science. At best, it is an evidence-based business practice.

Learn about A/B testing, probabilities, confidence intervals, placebo treatments, selection biases, and more. Then, you can only add Marketing Science to your LinkedIn profile and be an expert.