I’m reading a fascinating book on the evolution of math and statistics over the past 100 years, and its impact on the scientific method of inquiry. This particular passage really caught my eye:
“A scientific career is peculiar in some ways. Its reason d’etre is the increase of natural knowledge. Occasionally, therefore, an increase of natural knowledge occurs. But this is tactless, and feelings are hurt. For in some small degree it is inevitable that views previously expounded are shown to be either obsolete or false. Most people, I think, can recognize this and take it in good part if what they have been teaching for ten years or so comes to need a little revision; but some undoubtedly take it hard, as a blow to their amour propre, or even as an invasion of the territory they have come to think of as exclusively their own, and they must react with the same ferocity as we can see in the robins and chaffinches these spring days when they resent an intrusion into their little territories. I do not think anything can be done about it. It is inherent in the nature of our profession…”
Make no mistake about it. Marketing, and digital marketing in particular, is a science (or at least it should be). And we are all – including me – subject to the type of folly outlined in Ronald A. Fisher’s aforementioned quote.
Keep this top of mind in your day to day. It will help you avoid falling into the trap of believing that your years of experience and measurable ROI have somehow inoculated you from being wrong at least some of the time. It will also help remind you to constantly question even your most cherished conclusions.
This is crucial, because the coming years will bring about a literal avalanche of data-driven marketing methodology that will likely falsify many of the “best practices” that many of us have leaned on for years.
