Despite its name, Marketing science is not just about science. It’s also about strategy, objectively using data to make decisions, and embracing ideas from other disciplines. It’s an endless process of analysis and adaptation.
It’s about embracing ideas from other disciplines
Having a scientific approach to marketing requires that you recognize and embrace ideas from other disciplines. As marketers, we are prone to building mental models and data models that are increasingly useful for our day-to-day marketing activities. But the truth is, these models are not as robust as they need to be. And that is where marketing science comes in. It helps you revalidate your mental models and develop new ones. It also allows you to conduct controlled experiments on almost any aspect of modern marketing.
Marketing science is a discipline that is about using data and research to make better, more informed decisions. It is about evaluating the generalizability of experiments and minimizing the influence of confounding variables. It is about designing experiments that are effective and iterating them in a smart way. It is about recognizing and correcting errors in the interpretations of the results. It is about intellectual honesty when analyzing the outcomes of your marketing initiatives. It is about using the science of marketing to make good decisions and avoid common mistakes.
It’s purely strategic
Whether it is to improve an existing product or service, create a new one or simply get a better understanding of customer behaviour, marketing science is the process of testing and evaluating hypotheses, revalidating experiments and evaluating generalizability. The term is also used to refer to the science of running and controlling good, controlled experiments and to the science of making decisions about how much formality to apply.
The best way to approach marketing science is to think of it as a scientific discipline, with the objective of improving the design of experiments and minimizing the number of confounding variables. This can be achieved through careful choice of hypotheses, designing and running controlled experiments and iterating those experiments in a smart way. This is also about intellectual honesty in the analysis of the outcomes and a desire to continuously drive for new learning.
If you want to work in the field of marketing, you need to keep an open mind to ideas and theories that come from other disciplines. You need to make sure that any hypothesis that you propose is a meaningful and realistic one.