Why Isn’t Marketing a Science, Part II

Note 1: This post is dedicated to Christopher Berry, Calum MacKenzie and David Morf, three gentleman who taught me new ways to solve old problems.

Note 2: This research began in June 2009 based on conversations spawned by Why hasn’t Marketing caught on as a “Science”?. A full paper will be available sometime in 2011.

Mass marketing is a uniquely US invention. It was an invention of necessity because up until the 1970s the USA was a uniquely monolithic culture. People immigrated to the US to be American and the definition was both supplied and propagated worldwide via TV, radio, print and movies (the only media and channels available at that time). The definition of being “American” itself was a product of US based marketing and intended to foster a consumer culture (it was very successful).

The US’s late 19th century and early 20th century economic power and geographic isolation (equivalent to information isolation or “islanding” at that time) enforced that “American” stereotype (material rich while being psycho-emotionally independent of others). Indeed, pop cultural icons were not deemed to have “made it” unless they conquered the American market. The end result was that everyone strove to market this ideal and marketing didn’t need to be a science — the market was so big that any effort was destined to be successful with only minor modifications to the definition of “success”.

Meanwhile, immigrants continued to celebrate their ethno-cultural uniqueness and usually in private, behind closed doors, in ghettoes with festivals that eventually became tourist attractions, etc., but rarely was ethnicity celebrated on main street.

Enter Consumer Choice

The late 1970s introduced a perfect storm of socio-technical events that worked to destroy the monolithic US market; the oil crisis, the rise of cable television and emergence of cellphones (both forms of information technology) and the influx of populations who wanted to maintain their ethno-cultural heritage at all costs. Where immigrant status was once considered a curse it was now considered a blessing. Uniqueness was transferring from the population as a whole to the individuals in that population.

A self-cannibalizing cycle emerged. Marketers started to market towards the influx of self-actualized immigrants arriving in the US due to their numbers providing them with previously unknown economic power. Self-actualized immigrants re-established ethno-cultural identity to existing peer minorities who had been taught to be quiet about their unique heritages and a generation emerged who gave up their americanized names for either assumed or given ethno-cultural names.

By creating and marketing to self-actualized immigrants and existing minorities, marketers and businesses acknowledged and validated both their ethnicity and economic power. By acknowledging and validating ethnicity and economic power, self-actualized immigrants and existing minorities were increasingly able to maintain their (in some cases emerging) pride in their ethno-cultural identities. Increasing pride in ethno-cultural identity allowed ethno-cultural exemplars to be demonstrated on main street. It was no longer a symbol of being “right off the boat” to walk downtown in ethnic dress and regalia.

The end result of this acknowledgement of ethnicity was an acknowledgement of diversity and individuality — again, uniqueness. This shift demonstrated itself in the market by giving all consumers more choices. Grocery stores that once only provided shelfspace to “American” brands and palettes are increasingly giving over real estate to ethnic specific foods and products.

The other place consumer real estate is demonstrating ethno-cultural diversity is in information resources. This first appeared with cable television systems. Originally solely in American English (the US produced and distributed the majority of information for this technology), cable television systems have become increasingly culture specific.

The mid 1990s brought the advance of cheap information distribution via the web and widespread cellphone technology. Now consumer choice is “complete”. The web has moved from an English only medium to a truly culturally diverse medium and if you want “the complete story” you can get the news from separate US, British, French, Japanese, Indian, South African, Russian, … sources with the click of a mouse. Macbeth is rewritten for Japanese and Nigerian audiences and Tales of the Monkey King are available with an American Western twist. The increase in web-enabled mobile devices means a diverse information pool is available 24×7x365 and the consumer demonstrates their information source preference more clearly than ever before.

Markets as Scarce Resources

When presented with scarce but necessary resources, technologies will emerge to exploit those resources as economically as possible.

European, African and Arabic businesses have been well aware of this for decades, centuries and millennia, in that order. Tailoring marketing messages and campaigns to a total possible market of seven million consumers is the standard and getting a response of 700,000 is considered a success. Traditional american marketing would see a seven million response as a failure.

Geomarketing or “local” marketing — emerging in the US as yet another innovation and big thing — has been the standard elsewhere in the world for quite a long time.

Redefining Information Hegemonies

One of the greatest challenges to marketing become a true science (at least in the US) is the existing information hegemonies — megalithic broadcast companies that own multiple information outlets owning multiple media channels.

These hegemonies purchase successful culturally specific outlets and channels to increase the hegemonies’ reach and economic power. Unfortunately, they then apply marketing methods based on media and information consumption models developed in the first half of the 20th century (when first radio and then TV were in every home).

These models will not thrive long into the 21st century. The cost of information production and distribution — once extremely prohibitive and therefore making information itself a scarce resource — is now, like Macbeth and Tales of the Monkey King. Information sources from anywhere in the world are a click away and available for anyone with an internet, wifi, etc., connection. YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr and related sites turn everyone into their own marketing company. A few nods from PayPal and basement efforts are internationally financed sensations “overnight”.

Technology and information distribution infrastructures were already defined by cultural constraints elsewhere in the world so the american style hegemonies didn’t exist even though “american” cultural standards did. It was possible for other cultures to leapfrog the US in applying concepts of cultural anthropology, linguistics, ethnic studies and other sciences to exploit “small” markets because their infrastructure required it¹.

And nowhere was the concept of “small marketing” becoming more obvious than in the online and mobile world due to the advent of social “small world” models (a concept borrowed from biopharmic clinical trials methodologies, mathematics, social anthropology and a few other sciences).

Changing Models

The increasing global awareness of cultural identity and diversity, the rise in ethnic pride and awareness, the acceptance of minorities and their requests for equal recognition, etc., are the psychological results of the information-accessibility explosion.

The increase in media outlets, methods and channels is destroying the old, american mass-marketing concepts and forcing marketers to use more and more scientific approaches and methods. Marketing is moving from a “…cast your bread upon the waters” mentality to a “choose your bread and waters carefully, and determine ahead of time how far to cast…” paradigm with the latter being something the rest of the world has been doing for a very, very long time.

Conclusion

Marketing will become a science. The rise and fall of disciplines (”neuromarketing” is the latest of these) attempting to explain marketing from a “scientific” paradigm is an example of evolutionary forces in the market looking for an answer to the “how do I best exploit this environment” question and not yet finding it.

Much as evolutionary forces caused biologies to answer “how do I best exploit this environment” with big muscles, big teeth and big brains so will several new disciplines take hold and only for as long as there are marketing companies willing to pay the prices they demand ². I offer an E³ — economic-ecologic-environmental — model because co-evolution, ecologic diversity and resource economics will always apply.

As with our world so with marketing as a science. Humans fall into a wide variety of ecological niches that range from the obvious (age, gender, language, … essentially hangers on from the mass-marketing model) to the increasingly subtle (decision styles³, intender status⁴, psychological needs⁵ — extremely rapidly.

The language of commerce has changed throughout history and it can be thought of mathematically as a function of “which cultural-language groups had the best information-distribution technologies” X “the largest audience ready and willing to accept the commerce message”. Any change in the information environment creates new opportunities in the information-environment. Only those willing to create the technologies necessary to explain the changes/new opportunities will thrive there.

Markets will have to become a science — first borrowing from existing disciplines then giving to them — just to keep up.

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1 – A favorite anecdote that demonstrates this is Atlantic Canada making digital phone and internet technology available to everyone who wanted it decades before the US. Atlantic Canada had never made the investment in copper wires and telephone poles as the standard communications technology. As copper based communication technology didn’t exist, installing a digital optical and wireless infrastructure was both possible and economical.

2 – I recently learned of a major brand who’s jumped on the Neuromarketing bandwagon in a big way. Realizing that a single person placed in an fMRI and flashing brand images at them doesn’t demonstrate “group” behavior, they’ve purchased ten fMRI machines — probably a US$10M investment in “cheap” machines alone, not counting training, staff, users, housing, maintenance, … — and placed them all in one room. This way they can get ten people into them at once at the same time and flash the exact same image to find out how the “group” responds to the brand!

Ah…yeah…

While the efficacy of fMRI, CT and related technologies for marketing purposes is still greatly in doubt (see Brain imaging skewed, “Nearly half of the neuroimaging studies published in prestige journals in 2008 contain unintentionally biased data that could distort their scientific conclusions, according to scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.” among others), the methodology itself is a legacy american paradigm — the only real answers are big, expensive answers…regardless if they’re answering the correct question.

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