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Article Excerpt
Winner of the Best Paper Award
What men seek is not knowledge, but certainty. Bertrand Russell
Thesis
What I want to explore here is whether there are any guiding reasons for the loss of heart that seems to have afflicted marketing and its various subdisciplines over the last few years.
Just witness the outpouring of dismal negativity that is unleashed on podia and in books with greater and greater frequency. Marketing practitioners bemoan the failure rates of new products, or the glacial speed of developing new products to market; agencies lament that they are not producing (being allowed to produce?) cutting-edge ideas for their clients, who are in turn putting their best ideas to the sword of research; creatives, most usually at the sharp end of this sword, turn to (or should that be turn on?) their planners to get them out of this research and destroy culture. Planners then pass the buck to the market researchers, accusing them of bringing nothing new to creative development or brand measurement since whenever.
What lies beneath this malaise, I believe, is a rearguard belief in the science of management and marketing which is deeply flawed in two ways.
First, it is based on the wrong type of science: a perception of science that is reductionist and mechanistic, based on 'physics envy' and the model of the machine. It is also obsessed with what I term 'arithmocracy', a trend that is becoming apparent in many spheres from our education system to the NHS, where accountability has created a culture of obedience to the God of Numbers. Instead of the old mechanistic model, the new paradigm emerging within the sciences has more relevance to business, marketing and communication disciplines, with its emphasis on biology and the living organism that is complex and can both learn and adapt. It favours patterns and networks, rather than fixed essences, and is more interested in systems and their interactions than in the isolated performance of discrete parts.
Second, it gives too much weight to science itself at the expense of art or creativity. Though the methods of science are important for evaluation and measurement, the spark that turns a product into a brand, or an organisation into a company, draws its strength from the creative process.
Devising a new brand, creating a new meaning embedded in it, allowing creative people to conceive a means of communicating it that resonates with that meaning, and using the techniques of research at the appropriate times and in revealing ways--these are all essentially creative tasks. We deceive and ultimately disappoint ourselves if we fail to give the creative muse its due along the whole line, rather than relegating it to the last third of the pitch. It is wrong to consider the period of development prior to the involvement of a creative department to be essentially non-creative.
It may help by seeing the process in terms of a blend of the new sciences of systems thinking, where novelty and surprise emerge at the edge of chaos, and alchemy, which believes in the material transformation of nothing into something. This view sees art, science and even magic as less divisible than is commonly presented.
Instead, it is time for those responsible for the development of brands and brand strategies to recognise the need for cross-disciplinary fertilisation of marketing theory. This is also conducted in the belief that exchange brings difference, and that from difference comes value and meaning. This means letting go of the reins of input-output control, but if that is the price for survival and growth in our industry, so be it.
Science, marketing and the lure of physics envy
What lies at the heart of the decline in Ye Olde Paradigm of Marketing, I will argue, is a reliance on the sanctity of science (or at least, one specific version of it), and in particular physics. At the root of this failure, I will argue, are the inexorable links that bind marketing in general and market research, as its loyal offspring, to the scientific mindset. Why, you may be wondering, are we going down this road again? Hasn't the debate been done to death?
Perhaps, but I think we have unresolved business with the art/science debate, if only because marketing has changed (some think it may even be dead), and, indeed, science has evolved to the extent that the relationship between the two bears re-examination. Science has suddenly burst back onto the marketing stage with the advent of the great neuroscience revolution, which the likes of Robert Heath have employed to great effect to attack some sacred cows of consumer psychology and generally irritate much of Leamington Spa. On the other hand, many others have come forward to reassert the importance of creativity in the domain of the economy in general and in marketing in particular. Then there's Sergio Zyman's reaffirmation of the marketing = science argument in The End of Marketing (Zyman 1999). (1)
Science and physics
Although well-known in academic circles, it is not always fully appreciated by practitioners how indebted (or dependent) marketing is on the notion and aspiration of science.
One recent example should suffice: the former head of Coca-Cola in the US, Sergio Zyman, who has gone on the offensive against what he sees as the degeneracy of marketing and (more recently) advertising. In his first assault, The End of Marketing As We Know It (Zyman 1999), he devotes a chapter to 'Marketing is Science'. Here he aims to dispel what he sees as the destructive impulse that marketing is all wishy-washy, airy-fairy, guruled idealising. Instead, he emphasises the nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty experimentalist, empirical side of things.
Like a scientist I collect data, I look at it and then I change my activities to reflect what I've learned. (Zyman 1999)
Now this is all well and good as far as it goes. Advocating a scientific approach in methodology where the emphasis is on a systematic approach is perfectly admirable: assume, experiment, review and revise is part of the job description. But to assert that the whole of marketing is a logical and systematic science and is primarily concerned with making predictions and checking them fails to do justice to the other spheres that make the marketing enterprise so exciting and unpredictable. It is not enough to talk of gathering data like a scientist, looking at it and then changing activities to reflect what has been learned. Scientists will also tell you that the ideas, the theories, the hypotheses that they conceive are the bedrock of their work as much as the data gathering and refinement. If anything, Zyman's argument gives support to the cumulative pro-science and anti-creative lobby and belittles the (dare I say it) more creative aspects of marketing.
Science is built up with facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. (Henry Poincare (in Buchanan 2002))
What concerns me more is that Zyman seems to be harking back to a bygone (or so I'd hoped) age of scientific management.
Organisational culture and scientific management
The intervening 90 years or so have seen a number of seismic cultural shifts across the globe. Wars, mass-market technological advances, interstellar travel, not to mention microwaveable pasta and one England World Cup victory. But whereas the world outside would appear unrecognisable in many ways, the management of companies has for the most part clung tightly to a model that really should have been consigned to the civic amenity site decades ago.
Since the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor's book The Principle of Scientific Management in 1911, a certain type of system has taken hold in (mainly larger) US conglomerates and spread throughout the (business) world. To call this 'mechanistic management' would not be too far-fetched. An engineer by training (relish that irony), Taylor propagated the view of science as that of the clockwork, atomistic, push-me-pull-you, tick-tock-ticktock, one-size-fits-all engine. Put this in here and that comes out there. (Anyone who has ever given a creative brief to a creative team will see where I am leading.) Even forgetting that this was written at a time when relativity, quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation were on the verge of upsetting Newton's apple-cart, the tenets of this management worldview have remained as persistent as the copy in a soap powder ad.
This was management of a factory, with people as cogs, reductionist efficiency as the dominant metaphor and a system that would guarantee the three cornerstones of a contented manager: predictability, consistency and controllability. People were no better than battery hens, cooped up in insalubrious conditions with a pipe inserted somewhere painful until they produced the requisite quantity of ... whatever. Taylorism begat Fordism, and from Fordism was constructed much of the management practice that was built in the United States and then exported. Despite the soothsaying of Tom Peters, for whom anarchy and chaos are the key trends affecting business, my claim is that despite a softer, more human touch being applied in Europe and/or among smaller organisations, the insidious effects of this model linger on.
The best management is a true science, Taylor wrote, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles as a foundation. (Freedman 1992)
In this scheme the manger is the omniscient and all-powerful scientist manipulating the passive worker.
Many managers are conflicted, I believe, as they have been trained to operate with the scientific mindset in place (either explicitly or unwittingly). This has caused a conflict between the model of science they have, of order through analysis, predictability and certainty, and the operating model of the world their companies work in which is increasingly chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Another excerpt from Taylor demonstrates the extent to which he emphasises standardisation as the key to implementing reductionism:
It is only through enforced standardisation of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions and enforced co-operation that this faster work can be assured. (Taylor 1911)
The origins of physics envy
The modern era has seen without doubt the ascendancy of science. And in the realm of science, we have seen the shift from the primacy of physics to the supremacy of biology. Lewis Wolpert is forthright:
In a sense all science aspires to be like physics, and physics aspires to be like mathematics. (in Midgley 2001)
This was even more brutally expressed by no less an authority than James Watson, Nobel Laureate and celebrated co-discoverer of the structure of DNA:
There is only one science--physics: everything else is social work. (in Malik 2000)
But biology is plainly not physics and an increasingly populous and vocal army of practitioners and writers in the sciences have come out and undermined the old order. This contrasts sharply with the linear, escalator approach of classical physics with its emphasis on predictability and consequence.
An elegant way of putting this fact is from Steven Rose, this time in Alas, Poor Darwin, a collection of essays devoted to attacking the UltraDarwinians, whom he criticises for being genetic determinists:
In biology 1 + 1 = 59.
(Rose & Rose 2000)
Don't walk away, Rene
At a time when the machine was fast becoming the dominant icon of the age, many thinkers saw this wondrous new mechanism as the most elegant way of seeing human endeavour. Inspired by the machines that were beginning to populate the world, from fairground automata to the elaborate clocks decorating churches, they claimed that life could be explained by the same processes of physics and chemistry.
One of the leaders of this movement was the philosopher Rene Descartes. As well as coining one of the world's most T-shiftable slogans, he tried to bring the new mechanistic perspective to bear on the mind/body issue. Along with Galileo, Francis Bacon and others, he established the modern, 'analytical', approach to scientific...
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