Is Data in Marketing over-rated?
What should today’s marketer put her money on - Gut or Data? Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit, said Phillip Kotler. For marketing to be successful it needs to subtly blend both science and art. But what are the science and art parts of marketing? With significant strides in technology today, it has become easier and cheaper for us to gather, store and analyse data. And that perhaps puts today’s marketers in the horns of dilemma. The needs of the modern marketer are increasingly informed by analytics, targeting and Big Data, driving us to believe we must become more of scientists than ever before. Marketers are strongly of the opinion that science rules metrics, with the intuitive marketing qualities playing little part. This thinking drives much of the effort in collecting zettabytes of data, umpteen metrics and zillion reports generated much faster than the human mind ca