Marketing Science and Art

This morning I read a quick post from Seth Godin's blog on whether marketing is a science or art (hint: its both).

This got me to thinking: no question that with my strategic planning background I fall into the science category in most cases, and I totally agree with Seth that the main problem for us science-types is that humans are the wild card in the "system". The artist side of marketing is much more likely to better understand the human wild-ness and react to that creatively and passionately that resonates with actual humans. However, as a science-type marketer, I come back to the fact that much of business can be measured (sales, profit, return on investment, shareholder value, debt-to-equity, share price, etc.). When it comes to marketing, many clients at the end of the day are going to be forced to tie their marketing to these measurable metrics.

So, how do you balance the two? How do you look at art and creative and make it "fit" into these business metrics? Fact is, often you can't, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Outstanding art will often fall flat because it doesn't generate sales. Terrible creative will often excel because it does generate sales.

As Seth says at the end of his blog, "Figure out what sort of marketing you're going to do today and go do that" and I couldn't agree more. The challenge for us as marketers is to not think of these two sides of marketing as adversarial. I believe the two complement each other very well. When they work together to understand the relationship between wild card humans and bottom line business metrics, advertising works well for clients.

Photo credit: Gaetan Lee, 2007, via flickr.com