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The field of epistemology is one of the core pillars of philosophy, and it can be
paraphrased into a question that gets to the soft and wiggly center of any truth we
try to defend: How do you know what you know? Epistemology is the study of the
origins of knowledge, and this question of how we know anything is often glossed
over in our daily lives because it is usually more convenient to just accept what we are
seeing as true enough to help us determine our courses of action.
accurately reflect the conditions of the actual competitive environment by the time we
commit to an overall launch. Our knowledge is imperfect. We run campaigns anyway
because the knowledge we have is often the best we can find among the impossible
ambiguity of human interactions. The math is good enough that we know theres a
relationship between the ads and the publics response, but we do not necessarily
know why they respond.
Digital marketers have more tools available to increase the accuracy of our
understanding of the customer journey, as well as an incredible amount of collected
data from which we can draw potential theories to test. The conflagration of
databases, audience pixels, first party data, onlined data, third-party data, and data
management platforms to parse and organize this information over the past two
decades is staggering to the uninitiated. We now have more information about
audiences and better insight into digital customer journeys than ever before, which
enables more accurate targeting and better personalization of ads, ad experiences, and
digital experiences writ large.
The information we glean from all of this structured data allows us to see valuable
probabilities (e.g. audience A is more likely than the overall population to be
interested in topic D or audience B is more likely to engage in online behavior C), but
we still basically have little direct understanding of why the relationships between
these audiences and their affinities or behaviors exist. We have ways to demonstrate
that we know a conversion happened, but this is not the same as knowing the source
of a customers motivation to convert.
Why do people see value in [stuff]? How do you know?
falling back on fallibility, testability, and the realization that ambiguity is not so
terrible after all. Theres a good reason marketing is considered both an art and a
science.
box is opened, and the cat is observed, the cat exists to viewers of this horrible
spectacle as if it is present in all of the possible states available to it: alive and dead.
Until we are measuring a marketing campaign, it exists in a similar sort of multipossibility state, but by measuring the campaign we collapse the overall number of
probable outcomes of its performance down to what we have observed. We make
decisions based on what we see and test for other possibilities from our campaign,
revisiting and redirecting the overall field of possibilities available to our campaigns
until our time or budgets run out. At Accomplice, this process or repetition is part of
how we automate optimizations, acknowledging the simple fact that every time we
make a decision we open up the field of possibilities to test again and learn anew what
generates the kind of performance we are seeking.
Every time we launch a campaign, we are embracing ambiguity, if only until we can
crunch the numbers to determine our performance and set new campaign parameters.
Likewise, even if we have an understanding of current campaign reporting, we do not
have access to the evolving motivations of clients or the great aggregate of other
factors that appear by chance to skew our results. Where Heisenbergs principle
proves to be true regardless the reach of our technology, it is not yet clear whether
marketing will be unable to bridge the gap between performance and understanding.
Pursuing understanding from the limited capacity of the knowledge we can develop
from technology gets the roles of marketing and technology fundamentally
backwards. If we build our campaigns around theories regarding the motivations of
our audiences, the technology allows us to quickly disprove erroneous and irrelevant
theories and begin forming harder to disprove understandings of audience
motivations. Marketing, like economics and sociology, is a study of motivations and
cultural factors that contribute to social interactions. Framing the use of data, or a test
for motivations for that matter, is important to marketing success, but it is only a
smaller part of the greater realization that what we are doing is leveraging technology
to learn more about why people make decisions and take action.
Until we are studying motivations, even as we frame our tests in the context of
generating the revenue that keeps our companies or clients afloat, we are condemned
to do our work amidst the uncertainty of an infinite array of possibilities for why our
campaigns succeed or fail. The technology makes it easier to forget how little we
actually know.
service feedback and listening to how customers and prospects describe their
motivations is as important now as it was before the proliferation of digital marketing
technology and channels. Stimulating discussions with customers regarding how we
communicate new products, services, and features is as important now as it was
before the proliferation of digital marketing technology and channels.
This likely seems basic, especially given the references to physics and philosophy, but
these are fundamental actions for marketers who intend to understand their customer
and run successful marketing programs. Marketing data and marketing measurement
are incredibly powerful tools that refine down the minutiae of campaign effectiveness,
but the over-dependence on these forms of knowledge can lead to data-driven myopia
regarding the bigger picture of what marketing is meant to do.
We communicate value.
Everything else we do must be in service of this function, and the testing we do needs
to be centered around the search for probable motivations rather than simply
maximizing KPIs. The technology we use helps us to better understand whether we
are communicating effectively and should be used to help us test the messages we
create to address probable customer motivations. Realizing a KPI maximum for a
single campaign will not drive the kind of marketing success a working understanding
of customer motivations will bring in the long run.
Conclusions
If we begin with the assumption that our knowledge and understanding are fallible,
and we interact with customers directly or via our marketing campaigns with the goal
of invalidating all of our theories about what motivates conversions, then we have a
hope of narrowing down what motivates customers to convert. With that knowledge,
we can re-form marketing efforts and concentrate product development in useful ways
for our clients and company performance.
We cannot be afraid to be wrong because we need to be wrong often enough to
understand how to do our jobs right. In the end, we still will not completely bridge the
gap and fully understand the depth and complexity behind the motivations of
customers. We will, however, be able to answer for all of the motivations we know
have not lead to conversions. More importantly, we will be able to answer for all of
the customer motivations we can continue to use in tests because we have not yet been
able to invalidate them using the technology we have available. Thats far more useful
than the limited number of things we can know for certain.
Our campaigns are experiments to figure out how to better serve our customers and
their motivations. If this our goal, the money will follow.
Many thanks to Idan B and Jess W for reviews and edits prior to the publishing of this
version of the post.
If you liked this post, please do me the favor of recommending it and/or sharing with
your friends and colleagues through social. I wrote this to distill and share some of
what Ive learned with my coworkers, clients, and readers. If its something you like
then Id be honored for you to spread this post as well.
Also, feel free to reach out of me on Twitter (@indasein) for any comments, feedback,
or to share your own thoughts. Thanks!