As technology has provided better and faster ways of tracking a customer's response to a given marketing campaign, the industry has increasingly become obsessed with numbers. This link resulted in this number of conversions. That direct mail piece resulted in that many phone calls. These poll respondents said this about the brand.
We like numbers. There is a feeling of security in being able to point to numbers to report, with apparent accuracy, the success or failure of a particular task. It allows us to make confident decisions - yes to that strategy, no to that campaign - safe in the fact the numbers predict the likely outcome.
But numbers can lie. These numbers that we base expensive, business-changing decisions on can lead us onto completely the wrong path.
I was inspired to think about our obsession with numbers to justify everything on watching this scene from The West Wing. What Joey Lucas - the hearing impaired White House pollster - explains is how it is very easy for numbers to trick you into the wrong conclusion. Josh was concerned how five congressional districts would react to the announcement of a five day waiting period on guns. He wants to predict how the White House stance on guns could influence voter behaviour in those five marginal districts.
Part of the role of marketing is to sway target audience opinion towards the message that leads them to your product. If a marketing campaign fails because of the numbers, does it mean you should scrap the campaign, change the product or modify the sales process? Nine times out of ten, businesses will assume bad responses to a marketing campaign means the campaign was bad and the agency or marketing team gets it in the neck.
But that might not be what the numbers are saying. The numbers may be saying 'we want to buy, but the sales process is poor' or 'we would buy, if the product did this instead of that'.
We need to look past the numbers. This is where it becomes imperative to have a strong culture of listening to your audience - and I don't just mean in your established one-way channels like your feedback form on your website. If the numbers can't tell you whether the poor numbers are due to product, sales or marketing, maybe the way customers are talking about it elsewhere will. Are bloggers criticising the product? Is Twitter awash with tweets ridiculing the marketing? Are the sales team getting regular complaints from people unable to complete the transaction?
Only by listening wherever your customers congregate and continuing to ask questions would you gain the context to the cold statistics that can lead to a more accurate interpretation of what they really mean.
Be careful of numbers. They could be telling you something completely different to what you think they are.
