Commercial marketing science about a sustainable system that is capable of yielding competitive advantage for your firm.
The application of the scientific method to marketing is as old as Claude C. Hopkins and the very late 1880’s and early 1890’s. It was during the days of direct response print and some out-of-home. He’d later proclaim, as an older man in the 1920’s, that the days of advertising disasters were in the past. Thousands decide what millions do – the reference to sample statistics as applied to marketing (that I can find).
There is a very rich region of research in the Marketing Sciences. Much of it has gone heavily mathematical with an emphasis on building models that enable marketers to predict the future. Several assumptions, now common in the pop marketing literature, are still rigorously tested and understood that much more deeply.
The purpose of academic marketing science is the search for truth. The purpose of commercial marketing science is to yield sustainable competitive advantage for an institution (usually a firm, but sometimes an organization or government). That focus on sustainable competitive advantage, by using the scientific method on a range of data, affords you the unique opportunity to continuously grow, improve, and adjust. Handling severe disruption is made much easier.
As your understanding of what works and what doesn’t work evolves, so does the market. In this way, marketing science is subject much more often to the traumatic paradigm shifts described by Kuhn in The Nature of Scientific Revolutions. Consider that what you are – the way that you see the world, the salient variables, cause-and-effect rules, and the language you use to describe it – is based on what you know about it. And since what you know about the world is changing all the time, so are you. The key difference in scientist that is aware of this dynamic is that we’re continuously open minded about evidence. We ask what needs to be true, and false, for a given set of knowledge to be accepted.
It means being in the right for as long as the evidence supports you being in the right, until new evidence emerges proving it wrong. At such point, the search for a new right intensifies, becomes contentious at times, and adjusts. It’s at this point that you’re humble enough to acknowledge the new right – and migrate to that. At which point, you’re once again in the right.
Marketing, as a science, is a system of continuous exploration, discovery, and revision.
