Our new season on the art and science of marketing continues this week with a focus on science. Specifically: which parts of a marketers job require a more scientific — vs. artistic — approach?

Surprisingly, the team comes to the conclusion that scientific marketing is only partly about leveraging data. Using a scientific process to develop marketing plans may be even more important.

Mary, Tom and Sean discuss how marketers can be very scientific even if they have no data at all to work with. This is because a scientific process that starts with a number of hypotheses about customer needs, competitors, markets, etc. can lead a company to ultimately determine which data is really important to collect and analyze, and what can be ignored.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to leverage the judgement of your team to create testable hypotheses about your market
• Why generating a hypothesis is the best way to maximize a research budget
• The important role that engineers and scientists can play in developing your winning plan

Here’s some quotes from the team’s discussion:

“If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything!”

“Don’t ever under-estimate the power of the market knowledge possessed by you and your team.”

“You can fool yourself by cherry-picking just the data that supports your point-of-view.”

We hope you enjoy the discussion and gain some helpful insights!