After 28 years working and playing in the field of marketing in support of the success of over 300+ clients, I have developed my own philosophy of marketing.
You could best characterize my marketing mindset as “marketing as a science that (sometimes) surprises.” I believe in architecting and building marketing systems, rather than one-off campaigns or tactics. And I believe in taking a scientific approach to doing so.
But the scientific mindset doesn’t mean boring. It doesn’t mean 100% predictable. And it doesn’t mean rigid.
After all, any seasoned marketer will tell you that marketing campaigns—or comprehensive marketing systems—are far too complex to be totally predictable. And they’ll also tell you that a rigid stance is the road to eventual diminishing returns on investment.
This scientific mindset comes with the confidence of knowing that you WILL get this all figured out. And yet, built into it is the capacity for novelty, for surprise—the “x-factor” being introduced into the equation.
This mindset, in my experience, encourages CMOs to boldly march forward without hesitation, but doing so in a way that is intentional—and that pays attention—to the noteworthy details along the way. And at the same time, it lends itself to the gathering of new data about what’s working, what could work better, and fine-tuning the system along the way. It also means remaining open to discovering new, creative approaches that break the previous mold.
I’ve distilled this scientific marketing mindset down to 4 essential traits:
The 4 Traits of the Scientific Marketing Mindset
In practice, the scientific marketing mindset has these characteristics:
1. Decipherability: Marketing problems and challenges (poor sales, low quality leads, inefficient spend) always have a solution, even if that solution is not obvious. It is there to be found, decoded, and understood through structured inquiry.
2. Reproducibility: Every event, every success, every failure has its precursors—its underlying chain of factors that led to that result. And once you know them, they can be reproduced (or avoided). Things work best when you first hypothesize, then test, measure, learn, and repeat.
3. Degrees of truth: Marketing truth evolves in degrees and is never fully arrived at—nor are past truths ever fully superseded. Context and conditions shift over time. Think of the evolution of physics from Aristotle (dynamics of motion) to Newton (classical physics) to Einstein (relativity) to Bohr (quantum physics). The goal isn’t certainty, but rather continual approximation.
4. Novelty: Due to the massive complexity of applying a marketing system to the real world over time, we can and should expect the advent of the unexpected—of novelty—to be injected into the equation. These surprise factors, too, have their causes, but the complexity of the number of interacting variables makes it impossible to anticipate all of them, all of the time. And they certainly keep us on our toes.
Getting Scientific Like the Big Brands Do
The corporations who have survived for decades or more have this in common: they have evolved from “trying a few things that we think are working for us” to “building a system that delivers the goods week in and week out.”
The scientific marketing mindset takes the chaos and confusion out of managing your marketing—by turning it into a workable system. Doing so helps you integrate your marketing system into the larger business-as-a-system itself, so that it’s built-in, rather than bolt-on. So that it becomes an investment, not an expense.
In fact, this approach is what huge corporations have done since corporations have been a thing.
But how does the little guy compete? After all, huge corporations have untold resources that the small and midsize business owner could never compete with. Huge corporations have the deep pockets to try what works, then reproduce it scientifically and on a large scale. They build out systems and processes.
The good news is that small and midsize companies can do the same, while leveraging the agility that comes from not being a mega giant. I can confidently say this because I have seen small and midsize companies do this again and again.
Most importantly, you can stop committing random acts of marketing and start getting reproducible results.
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Ready to get scientific with your marketing? Contact Ambient Array today and start architecting your marketing system.
