Why are marketers so engineered to be data-driven?
Nour Hamam, Freelance Digital Marketeer
A lovely and insightful encounter with the team at Ogilvy (shout out to Joe Lipscombe and Kassandra for a lovely talk) part of our women in marketing group based in Dubai.
They highlighted the science behind consumer behavior and it was amazing to learn why are we as marketers are engineered to be data driven
Joe gave a great example of a day care fine being imposed to avoid tardiness in picking up the kids, the day care was expecting parents not to be late anymore once they did that, (as a daycare isn’t economically sustainable to keep kids waiting as it requires hiring more staff) however it was just the opposite, why? It was because they put a price on it, making it justifiable to be late.
This is proof that data driven campaigns or ideas are not always the best way, as people are hackers, they will find ways to beat the systems thus creating a loop or misalignment in data! That will leave marketeers baffled as why their campaign didn’t perform as well.
A Mexican city came up with a “solution” to in an effort to tackle high pollution the program was called “Hoy No Circula”, by banning certain plate number or codes to drive on a certain day so for example if your car starts with code “A” you couldn’t drive on Saturday and if it starts with code “B” then on Sunday, (This is also used in high population volume cities like Beijing) hoping it would be a solution to the increased number of pollution, the opposite happened! People found a way to hack the programme by getting second cars that released more emissions!
Another case Joe gave was the story behind Uber, the famous car sharing app, the reason behind its massive success? Giving people control!
At a tap of a button people could control when the Uber would arrive, what kind of car and the destination! When broken down like this it makes sense, for those who were born 90’s and 80’s (millennials) would know, hailing a taxi would be the worst experience because there is no time frame, leaving the person frustrated to not know the arrival or destination.
Another interesting example was an interview from the 1950’s was Salvador Dali, the great surrealist artists behind the painting “Persistence of memory”, in a interview gave he said that he used to sleep with a wooden spatula in his mouth that would leave a “clank” when dropped, and as soon as he woke up he would jot or paint what he saw in his dreams. The state of this is called “hypnagogia”- the thing you experience between sleep and awake. The self proclaimed eccentric artist was way ahead of his time since the 1950’s.
Fostering an environment of creativity is no easy task at an agency that relies solely on data, when the senior directors or the board of an agency demand to see data driven results, remind them of this story by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali!
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