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Although we start from the same place (i.e., that most marketing programs don't work and brands are rapidly becoming more similar than different), the difference between Bruce Tait's assessment that marketing science has failed (as reflected in his recent article, "The Failure of Marketing 'Science'", Brandweek, 4/8/02) and ours is profound. Tait believes that "the scientific approach to developing brand strategy has failed to improve marketing's track record"; we believe that marketing science can improve the performance of marketing programs, but it usually doesn't because what passes for marketing science today resembles 18th century medicine—when doctors used blood-letting and/or leeches to treat everything from the flu to cancer. It's crude; it's simplistic; and it's leading companies in the wrong direction.

A closer look at how most contemporary companies actually make mission-critical, multi-million dollar marketing decisions reveals more quackery than science. Senior management hands marketing managers a set of revenue objectives and deadlines, typically driven more by perceptions of what the company needs to do rather than what's realistic or possible.

Feeling pressed for time, these managers typically ask researchers to run a few focus groups, make 100 phone calls to test a concept, or undertake one of the many other popular techniques we refer to as death wish research. The analysis of the data collected is more often than not very basic, mostly cross-tabulations and maybe a few correlations to test the relationship between a couple of variables, but its quick and easy to understand.

Take targeting—the most fundamental strategic decision for any brand, product, service, or company. The vast majority of marketers believe that focusing on subsets of buyers is the most efficient way to develop a marketing program, but don't know how to segment their market or which target group is best. Reliable and valid segmentation requires a large-scale study with advanced analysis, which takes three to five months and costs $200,000 to $1.2 million, depending on the consulting firm. Most marketers balk at the time and cost, and opt instead for what we call "the three-minute segmentation study," which consists of hypothesizing three or four variables out of the thousands possible that might be best to segment buyers.

They interview a few hundred buyers in the category, almost always by phone or over the Internet and do cross tabulations on the data revealing something as straightforward as "15% of the buyers in this category account for 85% of the volume" or "25 to 54-year-old-women account for 78% of sales in this category." These are not the kind of strategic insights that will help to differentiate a brand and the odds that these segments actually reflect the company's best opportunities are virtually zero.

Nevertheless, techniques like the three-minute segmentation study seem reasonable to marketers because they are quick, low-cost, and often corroborate what they already intuited. More importantly, the techniques seem scientific because marketers can hold a heavy notebook full of tables and say, "We've got the numbers! We've got the research!" Though they may take less time and cost less money, death wish research and simplistic analysis offer little in the way of actionable value. What companies usually get from this superficially scientific approach is more misinformation than information, which then contributes to the failure of marketing programs. So, not surprisingly, the confidence Tait and many others have in marketing science has declined.

Rather than follow the Flat Earth Society, a few companies have boldly applied real scientific principles—consisting of rigorous analysis of unimpeachable data—to marketing have transformed their businesses. Mobil, now ExxonMobil, for example, undertook a large-scale quantitative study and used sophisticated analytical techniques to identify a profitable target and a compelling positioning which the company developed into the Mobil Friendly Serve campaign. Friendly Serve promised and delivered on friendly, fast, and clean service stations, translating into double-digit sales and profit increases each year and counting.

Marketing today should be as much of a science as it is an art, but we have a long way to go before this is a reality. The path to success does not start at the door of the agency creatives. We've seen their work all too often—the 8 out of 10 "creative" ads we see on primetime TV every night, which communicate no selling message (i.e., positioning) and sometimes not even a brand name. Brand strategists need to get back in the ideas game—as Tait suggested—challenging their perceptions of what consumers want and need. But they also need to distinguish between the real scientific tools and techniques that they can use to test ideas from those that only offer the trappings of science.

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