I had lunch with a colleague a few weeks back who had just been promoted to director of marketing at her publishing company. She remarked to me how excited she was by the strength of her team and the two new hires she’d be bringing on. But she was especially happy that she would soon be grounding her company’s marketing efforts in some science and data. One of her strengths is “the numbers side of marketing" and understanding how to read the story being told about a market from the relevant, factual information.Too often marketers and those who manage them forget that good marketing always has two sides: the creative side and the numbers side. I find this imbalance especially prevalent in industries like publishing and digital media, where creative types abound. The creative side of marketing—positioning products, choosing platforms and crafting messages, finding product hooks and selecting appropriate designs, creating catalogs and promotions, going out to and wooing an audience—has sex appeal. It’s flashier. So often it gets all the luv. The majority of attention, energy, and funds flow to the creative side. But marketing is also very much a science. And numbers-based marketing—based on customer research, past performance history, industry growth indicators, trend analyses, brand measurements, etc.—is equally important. Each company has to test and find the right balance of these two sides for themselves. But I am often saddened when I see publishing companies—and in particular religious publishing companies—spending thousands of dollars on direct mail or advertising campaigns when they have not even done a thorough analysis of their own sales data. When they have barely skimmed the surface of the information available to them, let alone invested a little money into what could be.
Kudos to my friend’s company for emphasizing this—and more on the subject in tomorrow’s entry.
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