Marketing is not maths. It's stories and hyperbole which are beautifully immeasurable.

October 10 2012

The social media marketing bandwagon is based on the not unreasonable premise that you are more likely to buy stuff recommended by a friend - or even just stuff that a friend likes... or mentions in passing.  This is old wisdom and Don Draper’s predecessors knew it well.  But what if you could actually measure that friendly influence and, better yet, capture it digitally and then put it to work marketing more and different stuff?  That’s what PeerIndex and Klout are trying to do.  

I’ve dabbled with both these sites, but I am always left nonplussed and feeling like I've missed something.  So I asked Twitter, "Does anyone take any notice of Peerindex and Klout? What do they use them for?"  I got a swift reply from Azeem Azhar, the CEO of PeerIndex offering to help with my marketing.  He drew my attention to an article he'd written for Wired entitled, "It's not the size of a person's network that matters; it's what they do with it.”  And this is the first paragraph.

“Marketing is maths and always has been. Ever since the first shopkeeper realised that a sign on the side of his building would drive more sales than it cost to erect then the mathematics of promotion and consumption have been in place. The sums have become more complicated, with search marketing now more akin to a science than an art, but the core cost/benefit calculation remains the same.”

I think that is arse. An accountant’s view of the truth maybe, but still arse. Marketing is not maths. It's stories and urges and persuasion and hyperbole; all of which are beautifully immeasurable.     Yes, you can and absolutely must count the number of stories you get and plot the peaks of site visits when the story hits fever pitch, but that’s measuring the thing, not the actual essence of the thing.   

I like the fact that despite the best work of some of the brightest minds, it is still impossible to quantify the most powerful aspects of how people relate to brands and why they choose them over others.   I can measure what you bought, but really why you bought it and what you were feeling is the most important and yet most ephemeral bit of data. Which is great because that’s the difference between science and art.   Proven facts versus smoke and mirrors.  

Azeem is a super-bright guy and far more successful than me but re-reading the arc of his argument it feels like he’s missing the beating heart of marketing.   And it’s not that I disagree with what he says  - a précis is that we have a more varied influence over our friends and colleagues than we previously thought and his company will turn that influence into digital data that you can ‘leverage’ to sell your shizzle.  

Except I think that, at the highest and most important level, the ‘what were you feeling’, bit can’t be measured and won't fit neatly into a spread-sheet.   You have to have an instinct for it. This is an art of the gut feeling.  A good brand strategist judges another person’s clout and peer influence instinctively, by reading their work and noting (mentally) who retweets their tweets and likes their posts.  If I had to make a list of my top ten most influential twitter accounts, I could do it off the top of my head in great detail.

Judgement and art appreciation can be taught and learned (I spend a lot of time teaching sales teams how to really understand their customers so they can send the right material, at the right time to the right people.), but in the end it is not a binary task - Marketing is a very human measure of what feels right, emotive and, yes, influential.

Every Finance Director wants to catch the smoke and measure the mirror, but any good salesman will tell you that empathy with the customer is the best way to unlock their wallet.  And that’s an artist’s gift, not a scientist’s.  I do understand the necessity of counting the cost and efficacy but you don’t need to digitise something to harness its power. Wind turbine anyone?

Footnote:

Azeem of PeerIndex was the only respondent to my twitter question. No one else I could find used either service beyond a curiosity.  And my Klout score is 50. Is that good? No one can tell me.