You Ask, I Answer_ Marketing Without Data

Magdalena asks, “Can you run effective marketing without data?”

Yes, you can, under certain conditions:

– You lack scale, so you can talk to customers all the time and get an accurate sample of what your customers want and need
– Data is not an essential ingredient to your business
– You are okay with a ceiling on your growth

We marketed for hundreds of years without modern marketing and data capabilities by having an absolute focus on the customer and guessing right a fair amount of the time. That, combined with limited channels of communication, made marketing without data very possible. The best companies over the decades collected smaller amounts of data and made great guesses, as well as some terrible ones (like New Coke).

Today, as smartphones and smart devices take over every aspect of our lives, marketing without data is significantly harder, but as long as you continue to serve the customer, you’ll guess right more often than not.

That said, if you don’t like guessing, then you can’t run effective marketing without data.

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Machine-Generated Transcript


In today’s episode, Magdalena asks, Can you run effective marketing? Without data? Yes, absolutely, you can think about the history of marketing marketing has been around for decades, if not hundreds of years, Modern Marketing certainly has been around for decades, marketing itself. I mean, technically, as soon as the first store was invented, in pre historical, you know, in, in pre modern times, that bizarre merchant shouting out his wares to the to the passers by, that’s marketing. So, absolutely, marketing has functioned. Without modern data analysis capabilities for very long time now

can what are the conditions under which you can market effectively without data, number one, you lack scale,

you’re okay with that, that that lack of scale, so that you in and the people who work for, you can talk to customers all the time, and get a

true sense of what the customer actually wants.

And again, this is not new,

even relatively big companies in decades past were able to talk to customers do surveys, do focus groups, things like that,

just get a sense of what the customers actually want, and actually need

today, obviously, that’s a little bit harder. But if you’re okay, with, you know, not becoming a massive conglomerate overnight, then yes, you can market without data. The second is that data is not an essential ingredient to your business. So if your business is a data based business, then obviously, you’re going to need to market with data. If you if it’s not, if what

you do is you just love to make people happy by making a certain kind of food or, or things like that, then yeah,

you can market without data, because the, the data is not an essential ingredient to your business. Third, if you’re okay, with a ceiling on your growth, if you’re okay with being a cap that we’re after, which you’re not going to grow, then you don’t need to use any data without marketing, other than what you do when you’re interacting with customers on a daily basis.

Marketers, like I said in the beginning,

they’ve marketed without modern data systems for decades, if not centuries, and the most successful ones stayed in tune with the customer. They talked to customers, they were out in the field every day, they were at the store front everyday, whatever the cases, they were talking to people every single day, about the business about what the customer needed, and things like that. And they guessed right, they guessed right a fair amount of the time. And they may, they were able to make a product a hit, because they guessed what the customer wanted. Steve Jobs was legendary for this. He guessed what people wanted and a fair amount of the time he was right even things that he wasn’t necessarily right about at the time, eventually ended up being reasonably right guesses like the Newton was their handheld device in back in the late 90s, it didn’t do very well. But the handheld device with machine learning recognition, very, very primitive at the time of handwriting, and things, of course, eventually became the iPad. And so he was known for being able to guess what the consumer wanted. They were there are tons of cases where companies did not guess right about a product and new coke. For example, for those of you with a little more grain your hair, you remember that Coca Cola tempted to change their recipe, it didn’t go so well. Today, that’s a lot harder to do. There is for a couple reasons. One was smartphones, smart devices, all these things have taken over our lives. And so they are transmitting a lot more data, which means that if if you choose to not use data as a company, your competitors are. And so they have substantial competitive advantage over you in terms of what the customer is saying, what the customer is doing, and things like that. And so marketing without that data is very, very difficult when your competitors are using data, this data, arms race and second, customers

or companies, I should say, have substantially less appetite and tolerance for risk companies now don’t want to guess they don’t want to waste years and potentially millions or billions of dollars on a product that the customer doesn’t want. And so data is absolutely essential to marketing to inform that marketing to inform product development in the marketing of something so that they have a guaranteed hit so that they have or it’s close to a guarantee is they can get really good example of this. And, and one that that shows you one of the risks of relying too much on data is hollywood, hollywood is not made an original movie in a really long time, we are up to what Avengers four and Iron Man for

All of these relatively uncreative formulaic

movies, because

that’s what the audience wants. And there there isn’t enough research to show that it’s worth taking a risk on a completely new formula that the audience may hate, because movies tape cost 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, except for the little indie breakouts. And so

today, marketing without data is substantially harder,

can you

be effective as a marketer? Yes, particularly if you are a more senior marketer, and you have other people who are good at data, who can provide some of that, even if it doesn’t necessarily drive decisions, at least informs your decisions. The New York Times had a great piece on this not too long ago, about being the difference between data driven and data informed data and foreign means that you take it into account as one of the factors in what you choose to cover are not carry but you don’t dictate your business solely based on the data, which is what data driven is. So can you be effective in marketing without data? Yes,

but as much, much harder than it used to be. And you have to work for a company that is extremely risk tolerant and because you’re going to be guessing all the time and

there’s a good chance you’re not going to guessed correctly.

They’re very, very few people who are who are Steve Jobs in any industry these days. So great question. Interesting question. This is actually a part of a series from brand 24. So we’ll be


this with them as well so on their blog, but a great question. As always, please subscribe to the newsletter and the YouTube channel will talk to you soon. Take care

if you want help with your company, please data and analytics visit Trust Insights calm today and let us know how we can help you

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