Oh hello, my name is mark ritzen. How are you um oracle have asked me to talk about artificial intelligence, and what i want to talk about in my session is artificial intelligence. The future of marketing is now that’s, not really what im going to talk about, and all credit to oracle. Um. Picking me to talk about this topic because they must know, i would imagine that im, not the worlds biggest fan of
Artificial intelligence im not against it, but i think there’s an enormous amount of bs that’s spouted about artificial intelligence and also to oracles credit they’ve. Let me build whatever i want about this topic and so im not going to talk about artificial intelligence, the future of marketing. Instead, im going to talk about something a little bit more basic im going to talk about putting genuine intelligence back into marketing, one iq
Point at a time i dont want to avoid the artificial intelligence issue ill include it, but id like to broaden things out a little bit if that’s, okay with you so lets start at the beginning. What do we really mean by intelligence? Um lets consult the dictionary. We we really mean two different, very different things. If you look first of all uh definition, two intelligence means the collection of
Information, the actual stuff itself that we gather and then, if you move up the item, one its the ability to acquire and apply keyword, apply that knowledge to a situation. So when we speak of marketing intelligence and intelligence in marketing, we really mean two link things, gathering insight, information and data and then being able to make sense of it and apply it to our strategic advantage. So heres what ive learned about those two conjoined challenges on my journeys?
through marketing uh six or seven lessons that i think are each equally important the first one is that intelligence is actually not the first step in the marketing journey the first step in the marketing journey is actually the concept of market orientation its one of our most foundational concepts weve been studying it in marketing for around about 35 years and yet so many marketers have no clue what it means and it has massive implications for them and everyone else so what do we mean by market orientation.
We mean the prime directive of marketing which is the ability of an organization or a manager or marketer to see the world the way the customer sees it which is our main function in marketing one way to think about, that is you, know there’s a tendency for Marketing to always be about us talking about that consumer out there when we talk about market orientation, what were saying is lets not start with lots of discussions about a hypothetical customer yeah instead lets do a 180
And, lets actually look at how, that individual sees, us looks at us our product. Our, service our company because that’s what market orientation. Means and there’s a few snags to that uh apparently very simple swivel it, turns out that you with the greatest respect and love. While you’re an expert im sure in the product and company you work for you’re, actually an idiot of consumption you’re, the least qualified person in the world to think about your
Product or service like a customer because you’re not you dont have to pay, for, it right and when you look at your product whatever it is you see uh your, work your career your salary your pension your future you just dont see photocopiers or software or training, Or paper clips yeah, you are literally the idiot of consumption and if you can embrace that through what i often call the humility of marketing and grasp the
Idea that how you see it is not how the customer sees it you’re in a good place to be a good marketer, so many marketers, unfortunately never get that concept. They think they can really see it um from their gut upwards, another way perhaps to conceptualize. This is when you signed your contract to join the company youve joined, you joined a very good organization, but what hr didnt tell you? Is you left something behind and what you left behind is the world of the consumer. Youll, never see it the way.
The consumer sees it, and so you have to do what all good marketers do, which is let it go. Yeah understand you’re, not the consumer and let it go and that’s crucial when we talk about intelligence, because when it gets to marketing intelligence, its, not your ability to answer questions is this website good? Is this price right? Does the product work? The answer to all those questions, if you are market oriented, is the same, which is
i dont know im not the consumer but as a marketer i can sure as hell find out so therein lies the trick first of all before we even get to gathering data is having the market orientation to be able to understand how to handle it when it comes in i often think of market orientation very much as digging a hole and then we fill it with data but if you havent dug the hole then there’s a problem so market orientation first then comes the intelligence bit.
and even before we get to that intelligence bit there’s another point i would raise before we start pumping lots of data into the company if you look at this concept of market orientation which again weve been studying and measuring in various different ways for decades its very intriguing what market orientation actually looks like there are many different scales and models that have been built to measure how market oriented is an organization my personal favorite is the the morton scale which was developed by rohit desh bhandi and and and john morton who are among the most famous.
marketers on the planet um marketing professors um and their scale is remarkably simple right the scale looks essentially at uh 10 questions that we ask employees um and what we get from that is a gauge of the degree of market orientation within the company now there’s lots of questions and by the way this isnt one of those very basic you know pop questionnaires this is this is a scale that’s been tested but you know by.
farley andish bandy across many different markets and industries anyway it looks at um many different items 10 different items some of which make more sense for example the first one there the organizational objectives of this service provider are primarily driven by customer satisfaction it makes sense that that would be one of the 10 questions that drives whether or not a company is truly market oriented or not but there’s.
a couple here that might surprise you for example there’s one here that says the company freely communicates information about its successful customer experiences across all departments there’s another that says data on customer satisfaction are disseminated at all levels in this company on a regular basis those two questions are interesting because what they tell you is market orientation isnt just about having oceans of big data sloshing around an organization before we have that we have to have the.
systems in place to spread that information in the optimal way and i often think of that as irrigation and what i mean by irrigation is i mean we dig the channels in a field before we pump the water in and in the same way in a good organization a cmo a senior marketer ensures that the uh systems are in place to share the data before we begin to bring the data in so you know again intelligence is as much about the channels that carry around the organization as it is the.
intelligence itself and then we get to the intelligence um and what what makes up that actual source of information i think there’s a huge bias especially with a lot of technical companies to believe that essentially intelligence is quantitative its big data its analytical and there’s kind of a uh a cliche which plays out and we could use the recent elton john biopic rocket man to illustrate it where qualitative data is the flamboyant creative um slightly indulgent sources of information that frankly you know they.
look impressive but theyre not whereas in this case elton johns manager is more serious and useful and applied and business-like and i just dont think that’s actually fair and in fact i would argue not only is marketing intelligence at least half qualitative it is first and foremost qualitative before the quantitative data kicks in let me explain and let me explain with a silly uh but hopefully useful example im now going to propose two different alternative ways that ill run the rest of our presentation okay.
in alternative end rest enough presentation and aposvenska im gonna do it all in swedish basically okay the rest of the presentation all my examples all my uh speaking all my slides will be in svenska i speak really bad swedish but ill give it a go that’s option one option two is ill do the thing in english and my slides will be in english but im gonna invert all the slides upside down for the rest of this session okay and there your two options youve got.
option a which is uh jaguar and svenska or option b ill do it upside down all right so take a moment and think which one you’d vote for a or b i think almost all of you probably more than 90 will go for option b other than a small proportion up in scandinavia everyone else is going to go give me b yeah and that makes perfect sense so i kick off the rest of my session with my slides completely inverted and at some point someone from oracle quite correctly steps in and says.
ah mark that’s not appropriate your slides are upside down and i say to the people from oracle chill out i asked the whole of the marketing audience what they wanted and almost 90 percent a massive majority requested that my slides now become inverted im just giving the market what they want now of course this is a stupid example i only gave you two options and neither of them were particularly palatable but that’s what happens when you present a limited suite of options or variables and then measure the outcomes yeah and.
this is a real problem if you dont understand the qualities the what before you measure the amounts the quantities the quantities are meaningless as you see with my example and it really is an issue i spent about four or five years training mckinsey consultants and mckinsey consultants love a conjoint conjoint or trade-off analysis as many of you will know is a brilliant method.
for assessing price and working out which attributes are most important and on several occasions they would share with me their best most recent conjoint for a client and sure enough they measured four or five different things and how important they were and id say to the client oh sorry my slides are upside down i promised there we go and id say to my uh to my mckinsey team um where did these options actually come from where did you get them from this.
part its pretty obvious its four or five things and look at the measures and look what its revealed and of course it was very easy to then say to them yeah but youve measured a b and c but what if variables d e and f that youve missed out here are actually more important they wouldnt show up on the conjoint so you get the point the lesson of marketing intelligence isnt just that you want qual and quant you want qual first to work out what the options.
are how they look and then we can progress yeah so intelligence is qualitative first and if i can be even more prescriptive in my journeys using research i would tell you that not only should it be qualitative the more qualitative the better and the ultimate source of qualitative intelligence is ethnography ethno people graphic describe its a rather fancy word for a very simple.
approach and the approach is get your ass out of the office out of the research facility because if the purpose of research is for you to understand your customers why are you bringing them to you into focus groups into surveys why dont you go out to them and experience their world and become intelligent by seeing what theyre going through that was certainly the principle of one of the most famous corporate ethnographic groups of all time park park with the research outfit for xerox and were a legendary team of researchers who understood the power of.
qualitative first this rather grainy photograph you see here its from a very famous case study in which the park team set about trying to improve photocopiers and that woman that you cant even see because the quality of the image is so bad behind those two gentlemen struggling with the photograph with the photocopier sorry is lucy suchman one of the most famous corporate ethnographers of all time so such one is.
actually hunched down in that corner under the coat hanger and she did that for hundreds of hours just watching and then talking to people trying to use photocopiers and from that insight that most qualitative intelligence they were able to build better more superior more intuitive photocopiers that’s the power of qualitative research particularly ethnography intelligence that is inductive and comes from the source itself now before we get too into the.
qualitative moment lets be clear there is a real problem with qualitative data no matter how many days lucy sits watching people use photocopiers or how many focus groups we do the problem of qualitative research is it cannot be representative yeah in order to get representative data we need quant and representation is important because if i can say these.
hundred people are representative of these 50 million people i can now imply causality i can explain things i can then experiment and see what moves things more or less with magnitudes i can test i can prove qual helps me understand the problem and articulate the issues quant allows me to measure it with magnitude and so when it comes to marketing intelligence as many marketing.
professors would tell you weve always got the challenge of people who are chemists and violinists some of us intuitively prefer quantitative data were chemists by nature others more intuitively are perhaps violinists we we ma we move towards more qualitative data and the reality is to be intelligent to master intelligence in marketing one must become a king or queen of both and that means working on your weaker hand when it comes to research and perhaps as we travel through the 21st century we should add to the chemist and the violinist metaphor a third option which.
is the super computer chemists violinists and machines because it is indeed time to accept that intelligence is also within its limitations also artificial the opportunity that big data now presents to us is overstated at conferences but by goodness over time it will surely come to fruition the ability to understand analytical patterns is very exciting for marketers and in particular the idea that we can let the machine go fishing for patterns and insights and learnings and then to test those learnings and to.
improve and alter things in in real time opens a doorway to intelligence that’s never been present before the closest weve ever got i would argue is probably retailers if you look at the last 30 years retailers have become all powerful and it wasnt always the case why have retailers become the powerful part of the marketing equation well partly its because they have immediate access to big data through store cards and the ability to experiment in store retailers have been at the front edge of.
big data and as they’ve tested and learned and evolved they’ve become far smarter and more intelligent than the manufacturers that supply them now multiply that by a billion times and the power of artificial intelligence becomes apparent in driving marketing intelligence but even once weve collected all that quantitative data id also still recommend that you observe the fact that intelligence works best backwards the hell do i mean by that well this handsome fellow here is alan iverson iversons one of the most famous.
marketing professors of all time hes a delightful fellow even though his photograph occasionally makes him look a little bit sinister and either has written a whole bunch of amazing works on marketing but my favorite is one of his most simple about 20 odd years ago he wrote a paper called backward market research which changed my life and made me more intelligent and i wanted to make you more intelligent too so what on earth is backward marker.
research let me explain well take yourself back to an experience ive had many times and im sure youve had to you’re in a room inside of your office with four or five colleagues you’re looking at some marketing intelligence a qualitative survey that’s been collected and your progressing through the slide deck of charts and and data points and tables.
and each time you come to a different slide you look around the room and everyone thinks themselves well what does this chart say what does it tell us well what it should be telling you is you’re all a bit at this and what i mean by that is you’re doing it wrong i i mean im as guilty of this as you are but you’re doing it wrong and iversons backward market research is a fix for that process let me explain so what normally happens.
in those sub-optimal situations is we design a questionnaire quite often with hundreds of questions yeah we stuff it all in there we then uh execute the question and it generates a ton of data at that point as weve just seen we sit in a room and we try and work out what does this data say and we normally take a very tiny proportion of those slides and those data points and we build a presentation.
which we then present at an annual meeting or a planning session or a review session yeah this is the sub-optimal story of most marketing intelligence what alan iverson proposes is we completely change that sequence we almost turn it on its head he proposes we do things backwards instead so first we begin at the beginning by thinking about what are we doing this research for we imagined the talk the meeting the planning session uh the the report we have to build or create and we.
we start at the end we then design the presentation now this seems odd but ive done this many many times and it works i actually build a powerpoint deck with titles and instructions for what will be in the slide um describing a table or a chart the chart just doesnt exist yet nor does the data to populate it but this is the table that shows me x correlated with y and this is the title and the order it goes in.
having built that presentation i then work out all the data i need to populate it that then enables me backwards to build the questionnaire not questionnaire creating data but heres the data i need now build a much tighter cleaner cheaper faster questionnaire to generate the data that i need and finally i dont need to analyze it anymore because ive already got my sequence i give the presentation or report that id already planned to give trust me this process makes you look more intelligent.
but also it speeds things up it cuts back cost it makes the process better id also point out that intelligence on its own is weak unless we add the time variable and intelligence multiplied by time should lead to evolution ive seen it now throughout my career ive worked for senior marketers all over the world and a small proportion have a special skill and that skill is they do what all the other marketers do but with a twist so they build a plan like most marketers do they execute the plan again like most marketers.
they then review the plan not all marketers do that theyre quick to build a new plan good marketers review the plan um in quite a lot of detail before they move on and they do that because they want to learn i know that sounds obvious but most companies from year to year dont learn anything they carry on as if whats just happened cant help.
them understand the future the good market is the one that have risen to the top and been more successful at least in my experience take time to learn from successes and failures and then they improve on the basis of that learning and then of course with that learning and improvement achieved they go back and plan again but they plan better intelligence leads to evolution its an ongoing challenge learning never ends.
and marketing intelligence feeds that never-ending process in the best markets so my argument to you is intelligence is actually several different things first of all its not the first step doesnt begin with intelligence we must begin with market orientation and creating room and understanding of the role that intelligence plays linked to that weve also got to create the irrigation in our organization so our intelligence can be spread around the organization because marketing is too important just for the marketing department remember that intelligence is qual first.
is understanding the problem in an inductive way and then its quant second measuring it with elegance and magnitude remember that there is now an important role for artificial intelligence but dont overstate it it exists within the parameters of general marketing intelligence and remember that of all the great lessons of market research the best i fear is the one that allen iverson teaches us and designing research especially the quantitative stage back.
to front can be very very powerful and finally remember that intelligence is evolutionary it should lead to you becoming better smarter more intelligent intelligence therefore isnt one thing its multi-dimensional if you’re smart enough to realize it thank you.
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