Modern medicine is evidence-based. The adoption of evidence-based medicine saw our lifespans double in the space of 50 years. That’s a remarkable achievement.
Sadly, evidence is missing in modern marketing practices. We rarely see any marketing discussion mention anything about significance, confounding variables, or correlation versus causation. Most blog and social media recommendations are anecdotal evidence masquerading as statistics. Overall, there is a disturbing lack of anything that one could fairly call evidence in recommending any particular marketing practice.
This becomes apparent when you start asking some simple questions about “statistically” justified marketing recommendations.
1. Are these numbers for B2B or B2C?
2. What is the impact of brand and market Leadership on these numbers?
3. What is the impact of fashionable trends on these numbers?
4. What is the sample size?
5. What is the breakdown by industry? Company size?
At this point, you are probably not getting your emails answered or your phone calls returned.
Some of these questions and related concepts have obvious ramifications- brand leaders are usually older, more mature, have larger budgets, and are more likely to optimize existing processes. So…any numbers hinting at a best practice and revenue growth needs to control for brand and market leadership. And any recommendation needs to be prefaced by “it depends”.
Generally, any statement like ’65% of best-in-class companies use X and grew an average of 20% more year over year then non-best-in-class companies’ is meaningless, or should be treated as meaningless without access to the support data and methods used. Without decent evidence and analysis there is absolutely no reason to make ANY kind of inference here between the use of X and growth. And even given that data and where there is a strong causal effect, there is the important question of whether the principle is applicable to other industries, markets, or business models.
In medicine, there is a very cool organization called The Cochrane Collaboration which aims to improve health care by providing systemic reviews of the quality of evidence being used to propose and select treatments- i.e. which studies are good, and which suck. Even in esteemed scientific circles peer-reviewed journals aren’t enough, and The Cochrane Collaboration aims to raise the bar by provide systemic evaluation of the quality of studies and the quality of how they are published. Is the data available? Can the study be repeated? These are other markers of quality are emphasized and graded.
Evidence-based medicine had doubled our lifespans. Would evidence-based marketing double our revenues? Is it even possible with so many confounding variables at play in the business world?
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