A Case for Ambiguity in Data-Driven Marketing

In God we trust, all others bring data William Edwards Deming

Marketing should start with an assumption that we are exploring the shifting
possibilities of customer motivations rather than trying to find a point of
maximum optimization against a KPI.
In digital marketing, we point at data in the forms of customer feedback or
online/mobile tracking of users as the source of our knowledge. We trust the
numbers so much that we expect every major digital marketing channel and
tool to provide tracking for our ads that connect them to on-site or in-app
activities. This is a requisite feature from ad channels, providing
accountability for the quality of impressions and the responsibility we have
as marketers to genuinely contribute to business growth.
Ad tracking technology is a formidable source of insight into the chain of
facts surrounding a conversion, and from it we can draw insights into the
receptiveness of audiences to messaging and their willingness to spend
money. All the same, the limitations of this data come in both 1) the
narrowness of what is reported, and 2) the separation between these facts
and what we really want to know. The data does not directly reveal the
intrinsic motivations behind the economic decisions made as part of a
conversion.
What we find when we sift through our databases of first and third party
data, as well as our campaign data, are relationships between messages,
audiences, and affinities. We learn some people are more likely to respond to
certain messages or topics and some groups of people are historically similar
to other groups of people. The data reveals these relationships, but it does
not help us understand why these relationships exist.
All the same, we talk about advertising, especially in direct response
campaigns, as if there is a causal relationship between the ads and a
conversion. The implied analogy is that marketing works the same way as
Newtonian physics actions cause reactions of equal measure even though
we end up with very little indication as to why. The data is explanatory of
events in this limited way, but unless we are building campaigns based on
testing for motivations, then we are not progressing our understanding of
why the events observed in our data occurred. This is as true for the plethora
of multi-touch attribution models as it is for the simplistic last-touch
attribution model still set as a default for many analytics tools.
In all likelihood, an analogy to quantum physics is more reasonable for
marketing than Newtonian physics. In quantum physics, one of more well
known concepts is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which boils down to
the inability to measure both the position and the velocity of a particle. This

leads to funky ideas like quantum super-positioning, basically a particle can

simultaneously be in every position it could occupy if not observed.
Marketing works in a similar way, at least with regard to how we can
understand prospect and customer motivations, because we are examining a
change of states rather than a mechanistic reaction.
The difference between a member of a target audience and a customer is a
conversion because people and companies go from one state of being
(target) to another (customer). Unless we are observing the marketing we
are doing, these people effectively exist in both states. Understanding this
transition requires setting up the tools we use (ads and analytics) to measure
conversions, attribute across all touch points, and connecting the dots of our
results back to the theoretical foundations of our test. Physicists look for the
breakdown of particles into energy to determine if their model of the
universe works. Marketers have the opportunity to contextualize conversions
and customer journeys into a framework for motivations that could generate
conversions by organizing messages, targeting, and digital experiences
designed to address them.
The campaigns we run are the best tool available for researching customer
motivations because we control most of the circumstances surrounding what
we deploy. If we build campaigns in the attempt to disprove theoretical
customer motivations, we can confirm what will not work and narrow the
range of probable motivations producing marketing success. While customer
motivations remain ambiguous, narrowing the range of possible motivations
to those we have not yet disproven will help sharpen our creative and
targeting to focus on the motivations remaining.