Watch for the smokescreen in the numbers
Sometimes in marketing courses it is called quantitative methods, sometimes statistics for marketing, but by any other name, stats is still stats and rarely popular among students.
That’s a pity, because just about every day we see marketers falling for slick numbers or failing to see an ill-considered or illegitimate inference for what it is – a smokescreen.
A little earlier this year a study of chief marketing officers got a run in the media, depicting gloomy views of the problems of marketers fighting for legitimacy. Now the subject is worthwhile, but the problem with this report, which did not emerge from media coverage, is that it has many quotes such as “only 25% felt this…”, or “40% felt that …”. But the total sample for this study was only 25 people! So while a statistic like 25% sounds solid, we are only talking about six-and-a-bit CMOs.
Dress something up as a statistic and people assume we have real quantitative data. It is not always so and it can severely affect the way we judge information. The report, by the way, had column charts and pie charts with multiple percentages indicated, all based on the same 25 respondents.
Stats 101 also includes material on decision-making and inference. A bit more of that would be handy as well. Recently, the AMI put out some early results from the Marketing Metrics Project research on senior marketing executives. It included a finding that only 43% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “the Board/CEO/CFO is comfortable with its ability to monitor marketing activity”.
That’s interesting, but when it made it into the papers it had become 57% disagree with the statement, which is somewhat alarming. But it is not so, as a good proportion of people chose “neither agree nor disagree”. Our release did not include the rest of the figures for this question, but it is just not on to conclude if some are white, then the rest are black.
Not all of marketing relies on quantitative data, although don’t get me started on the frequent dreadful misuse of qualitative data from sources such as focus groups, but to be a good marketer you do have to be capable of reading the numbers and knowing what they mean.
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