Ciceron Blog Archives

Acceptable Uncertainty

Oh, it's swinging all right -- and metrics aren't going away -- but I've come to accept that as marketers we desire a certain acceptable level of uncertainty in our marketing strategies. In that chasm between total absolution for accountability and unfettered creativity is the art and beauty of marketing. The right brain in us demands that magic is created somewhere along the continuum. If there's no magic, there's no beauty. Marketing magic is that certain "I don't know exactly what it was but something beautiful just happened" to which we can only ascribe raw and incredible talent. What "just happened" was the brilliance of your work. Then, the unflinching adoration of your peers. With a final transcendent respect from your industry, award ceremony and all.

And then a flock of unicorns fly breezily over fields of cotton candy and mewing baby kittens.

What seems to be missing -- if not dodged -- from many marketing strategies is a defined level of informed, and therefore acceptable, uncertainty. In this business of performance or metrics-based marketing, we tend to be absolutists about measurement. "If you can't measure it, why do it?" is the frequent mantra. But no one seems to go on to answer the question. I believe that we should be able to say with a straight and serious face that marketing metrics can't tell us everything, but they can tell us enough of what we need to know to make more informed, expeditious, and insightful solutions.

The metrics software solutions out there over-simplify it. And of course they do. They come from the left brain brethren of our business. All of these solutions seem to pitch that all you need to do is plug them in and - viola! You are a marketing magician! For that reason alone is why mainstream marketing is still somewhat leery of metrics platforms. These providers seem to think that you can automate creative problem solving.

There's a DMZ in all of this. Marketing will always have an inherent amount of uncertainty. Savvy marketers are those who can artfully navigate through the fog having used all of the tools available to get 80% to the final destination. The savvy marketer recognizes that people have engendered their trust in his or her creative instincts to make wise and informed decisions about where to invest those final scarce marketing resources. In modern marketing, this last surge forward is where creativity, risk-taking, and expertise flourish.

What concerns me - on the other hand - are the marketing organizations led by people who say "software's for tech-heads" or think that 100% pure marketing instincts "have gotten me here, why change now?" Would you really get on a cruise boat with a captain who denies the power of GPS or ignores the National Hurricane Center? What I want to know is that when things are really intense, there's someone at the helm who's been there before, who's comfortable with all the information he or she has, and applies that keen sense of instinct, brilliance and smarts to pull off a huge success. That's leadership.

There are perfectly appropriate times to speculate on marketing outcomes, rely on anecdotal evidence from the sales force, and plain old guess on a strategy, but only for that final 20% of a marketing strategy. Is that number somewhat arbitrary? Possibly. But when I think back on my career pre-Internet, I consider the amount of time it took to research markets and customer behaviors. I consider the amount of money we spent of demographic surveys. Most of this information is now at my fingertips, reflecting my actual customers not the researchers' survey participants, and is 100% actionable.

In this day and age, with the metrics platforms and services available to us, if we're redundantly investing our limited yet brilliant strategic resources to that which has already been proven and measured, then we're simply going to react too slowly. Metrics aren't just about knowledge per se - they're about speed. The more quickly we can define the smallest amount of informed and acceptable uncertainty, the quicker we can apply professional and creative magic to outperform and outpace our competitors.

Learn more about how to use these powerful tools to advance your strategic marketing objectives by attending our next seminar - "Measuring for Success: Moving Beyond the Black Box of Web Analytics."