Friday, June 08, 2012

Simply No Place For BMOCs

The issue published this week of the McKinsey Quarterly features an article with with the following five questions that senior executives should ask to maximize their marketing’s worth.

And it comes as no surprise that they all involve research.

  1. What exactly influences our consumers today?
  2. How well informed (really) is our marketing judgment?
  3. How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?
  4. How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?
  5. What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?BMOC

The authors wisely note that “data remain only as useful as the expertise you bring to bear, and judgment will remain a hallmark of the best marketers.”

However, the problem with far too many marketers and the people who manage them is that they want to jump to action based only on uninformed opinions.

Failing to grasp that judgment is far more than opinion, these are the folks who denigrate any reference to research or data-based decision-making.

A new IBM survey identifies three things that separate outperformers from underperformers: 1) access to data, 2) capacity to draw insights from data and 3) ability to translate insights into action.

A caveat would be that it requires humility to be good at marketing and to have the guts to subject opinions to empirical testing and data evaluation.

There is simply no place for BMOCs.

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