Having knowledge of something that needs to occur does not ensure it will get done. Just understanding the need for and value of doing a certain thing is not enough to guarantee it will happen. For example, most people understand that dietary changes and exercise are the keys to a healthier lifestyle and better fitness. In fact, they can have in-depth knowledge of exactly what changes are required over what period of time to produce those changes. But actually making those changes is another matter entirely. It takes will and discipline to sustain an effort that achieves results; regular encouragement is also helpful, because it is hard to change deeply engrained habits and thinking.

Adopting and committing to a marketing analytics process has many parallels to a pursuing a healthy lifestyle. It is possible to gain the knowledge, proficiency, and skills to succeed with marketing analytics and still fail. Understanding the precepts, accepting the wisdom, internalizing the recommendations, and believing the advice presented in this book or from other sources on marketing analytics is necessary for success. However, these things are not enough to realize the hoped-for change from making the effort to become a data-driven marketing organization through the use of analytics. The gains and improvement that are possible through marketing analytics are the result of embedding its processes deep into the culture of marketing and the rest of the organization. In other words, the analytics process can’t just be a patch sewn onto the marketing cloth to hide a flaw—it must be a series of threads woven directly throughout the fabric so analytics become integral, even indistinguishable, from what marketing does.

The pursuit of success with marketing analytics isn’t just a matter of adding the analytics process to what marketing is already doing. Success requires changing the culture, and the resistance to cultural change is often the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Full cultural acceptance occurs when there is an organizational determination to pursue and succeed with marketing analytics. It’s characterized by a long-term perspective, the will to continue even when the results aren’t good or the process challenges are difficult, and a resolve to follow the process wherever it leads. Conceptually, it is quite simple to understand that these factors are critical to success with marketing analytics, but that doesn’t make it easy to build and sustain a successful process. A number of challenges stand in the way of spinning up a marketing analytics initiative and maintaining its momentum.

To increase the chances of success with marketing analytics, organizations cannot be naive about the challenges that come with venturing into this territory. This chapter discusses some of these challenges with the goal of creating awareness, so that with awareness comes the ability to avoid or at least better manage these challenges. In truth, these challenges are not fully avoidable. Any organization that attempts to take a serious approach to marketing analytics is going to encounter challenges at some level. Knowing what they are in advance minimizes the discouragement that can cause marketers to abandon their efforts. The foreknowledge also helps marketers prepare to deal with them; it’s far easier to avoid risks and dangers when you know of them in advance.

Challenges that marketing teams are likely to face when attempting to instill analytics into the marketing psyche include lack of clear direction, lack of support, lack of enthusiasm, and lack of freedom. These challenges are on top of the skills, tools, or data challenges discussed in previous chapters. These are broad areas of challenge, any one of which has more than enough potential to sink an analytics initiative. The rest of this chapter is concerned with exploring these areas of challenge in greater detail and suggesting strategies for mitigating them.

Lack of Direction

Marketing analytics, a business process that provides tremendous direction for the marketing team, can itself suffer from a lack of direction. This lack of direction is the result of failure to articulate the vision for embracing ­analytics within the marketing function. Too often, leaders simply assume that the vision for doing something is clear to everyone, when in fact it is not. Other times, leaders fail to understand how important clarity and unity of vision is to helping any initiative succeed. The higher the stakes of an initiative, the more important it is to ensure that everyone buys in to the vision for doing it. This is the first thing that must happen on the journey to success with marketing analytics.

When pursuing success with marketing analytics, having a vision for doing it is the first important ingredient in the recipe. But defining, clarifying, and communicating the vision is often sacrificed for the sake of expediency. Failing to spend adequate time to sort out the vision is a fatal oversight. In the metaphorical journey that marketing embarks on when adopting analytics, the vision is the destination. Whatever marketing hopes to achieve through analytics is the substance of the vision. The absence of a compelling vision for marketing analytics puts marketing at risk of winding up someplace other than where it intended, to paraphrase Yogi Berra.

It is the job of the CMO to cast the vision for anything marketing does, and this certainly includes analytics. It is entirely possible for a marketing team to throw itself headlong into an analytics initiative without a vision to drive the effort. Marketing analytics is, after all, a great idea. It’s very easy for everyone to agree that it is something “we should be doing.” However, what is the purpose of the effort? What goals does the team have in view for the analytics process? How will the team allocate resources and use the data the process produces? How will the team even know what kind of data to collect and analyze with the process?

As this book has discussed, analytics is not some extracurricular activity the marketing team pursues when it has time or feels like it. Analytics becomes the hub of how marketing thinks, plans, and operates. But without a vision, what happens when there are obstacles? What motivates the team to keep up the effort when the work becomes difficult? In the absence of a vision, the answer to these questions is “nothing.” A marketing analytics process that isn’t driven by a compelling vision is a short-lived enterprise. The moment it is no longer convenient or easy to stick with the analytics process, it is abandoned. There will surely be moments where analytics are no longer convenient or easy.

What’s the right vision for marketing analytics? It’s increasingly common to see marketers turn to analytics to help transform marketing into a true revenue-generating function. Other marketing teams wish to minimize or eliminate the effect of internal politics on how marketing operates and its budget. These examples are just two of many that can give the initiative some direction. Each CMO must determine the right vision for propelling the marketing analytics function. They must regularly communicate it with clarity so that everyone on the marketing team, as well as the external stakeholders, knows where ­analytics are taking the team.

As important as vision is to providing direction to all that marketing does, including the analytics process, it gets its direction from values. What are the non-negotiable values on which the marketing analytics function should rest? The analytics need to stay firmly tethered to those values and pointed in the direction of the vision. An example of a value associated with marketing analytics is an “analytics first” approach to every marketing initiative. When this value exists, one of the first steps in planning any marketing initiative is the identification of metrics to measure it. Those metrics should serve as the final arbiter of how an initiative is doing.

These values really determine how seriously marketing will take analytics. Therefore, when a marketing team is first embarking on an analytics initiative, it should take the time to determine its values. For marketing teams that already have an analytics process but haven’t expressed values to guide it, it’s never too late to put some in place. Here are 10 representative values that could serve as guides for any marketing analytics initiative:

1. Every marketing initiative will begin with the determination of success metrics.
2. We will not use or report metrics based on inaccurate or incomplete data.
3. We will not publish “vanity” metrics just to make marketing look busy or because someone likes to see marketing numbers.
4. Everyone has an opinion, but metrics are the final arbiter when determining results or success.
5. When the analytics output conflicts with conventional wisdom, we’ll believe the analytics.
6. When the analytics reveal good results, we’ll proudly take credit.
7. When the analytics reveal poor results, we’ll take responsibility.
8. We will not use the output of our analytics process punitively, only to improve.
9. Analytics don’t make our decisions for us, but they will inform the decisions we make.
10. Every marketing initiative will end with reviewing the success metrics.

Having a vision to provide direction to the marketing analytics process, combined with values to guide how the process and its output will work, go a long way toward integrating analytics into the fabric of marketing. Even with this in place, other challenges remain.

Lack of Support

It is naive to believe that just because something is a good idea, everyone will support it. Marketing analytics is certainly a good idea, but the lack of support from in and outside the marketing department may catch many supporters off guard. When pursued to a mature level, analytics will transform a marketing department into a data-driven entity, for which most of the doubt about its performance is vanquished. Who wouldn’t want this? As Chapter 1 describes, most of the marketers in organizations that are flying blind with respect to analytics, or within organizations using pseudo-analytics, are either not receptive to or are just feigning interest in them. These kinds of marketing organizations probably don’t want an analytics initiative thrust on them, but everyone else would, right? Not necessarily.

Chapter 2 contains a discussion of marketing analytics challenges, summarized in Figure 2-7. This issue of support, either from the executive team or the marketing team, doesn’t rank very high on the list of challenges. It’s therefore important to clarify why this chapter revisits this topic in much more detail. Support for marketing analytics, or lack thereof, can come in two forms:

1. Support for having a marketing analytics initiative: the subject of Chapter 2.
2. Support for or belief in the output of the marketing analytics process: the subject of this chapter.

Here’s what every marketing analytics supporter wants to believe: the output of a valid marketing analytics process based on accurate data trumps all other beliefs, biases, superstitions, and opinions. In other words, simply putting the metrics in front of nonbelievers should immediately spur acceptance of the logical conclusions of those metrics. After all, the data is the data. The data represents irrefutable fact. How is it even possible to dispute it? Yet it happens with regularity: logic-defying resistance to metrics that frustrates ­analytics supporters.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to marketing analytics acceptance, support, and belief. It doesn’t matter whether the discussion is about climate change, the link between vaccines and autism, or marketing analytics: previously held convictions don’t just easily give way to cold, hard facts. In a famous case study in psychology, Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger stated, “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”¹ Marketers must understand and prepare for the likelihood that the measurements and data produced by their ­analytics process may not enjoy automatic and instant acceptance. Becoming data driven and weaving analytics into the fabric of marketing can’t occur until such bias is dealt with.

Anyone who has ever uttered the phrase “why won’t you listen to reason?” in an argument understands the frustration of dealing with someone who discounts or ignores facts. There’s some interesting science behind this phenomenon: “Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call ‘affect’). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it.”²

Data and information that negatively reinforces beliefs doesn’t have smooth sailing to acceptance in the brain of the recipient. When confronted with data that doesn’t conform to beliefs, often it isn’t reasoning that occurs but rationalization. Consider this scenario: an older business owner believes that traditional print media advertising is the best way to reach customers. “We have to be in the newspaper” is the edict from this owner. This owner’s marketing director runs both traditional print and digital media campaigns, tracking key metrics; these metrics prove that digital far outperforms traditional print. However, the owner doesn’t agree with the data, and instead allows personal bias to prevent the marketer from diverting funds away from traditional print to invest more heavily in digital.

In this scenario, the marketer does exactly what should occur: identifying success metrics and using them to monitor results, then making improvement actions. The business owner won’t hear of it. What is happening in this scenario has been experienced by many a seasoned marketer, and its occurrence isn’t limited to just marketing or analytics. “Our ‘reasoning’ is a means to a predetermined end—winning our ‘case’—and is shot through with biases. They include ‘confirmation bias,’ in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and ‘disconfirmation bias,’ in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.”³

Scenarios like this reveal how truly difficult it is have complete objectivity about data. All data has to pass through a filter of understanding consisting of our biases and paradigms. We can’t easily suspend these because most of the time we don’t even realize we have them. Even when we do have awareness of them, we can’t just turn them off. The result is that even with the best of intentions we easily slip into rationalization mode to shade conclusions toward our own bias. This rationalization bias can come from any quarter. The example scenario presented here is of external bias affecting how marketing operates, but bias can just as easily come from within the marketing team.

What can marketing analytics advocates do to avoid this frustration? It isn’t entirely avoidable, but it is possible to minimize or counter the effects of bias:

• Recognize that it exists. Like death and taxes, the presence of bias affecting the marketing analytics process is inevitable for most marketers. This bias against analytics is a feature of the marketing landscape (and many other landscapes).
• Don’t be surprised by it. Being indignant because bias impedes progress or acceptance of marketing analytics is an understandable response, but it gets you nowhere. Plan to encounter it and diligently work through it.
• Know who your allies are. While there are usually a few people with bias, there are also supporters of the analytics effort. Take a census to understand the views of the stakeholders, and then leverage the influence of your allies.
• Use the culture to your advantage. Culture can create lift or drag for marketing analytics—sometimes both! If there are elements of culture or specific core values that support the marketing analytics process, don’t hesitate to use them.
• Think small. When the response to the marketing ­analytics process is hostile, and it comes from a source with veto power, prepare to retreat temporarily. In the face of such opposition, don’t attempt to use analytics to justify major marketing changes, because those efforts will fail. Instead, temporarily limit the application of analytics to smaller matters.
• Avoid outright confrontation. It’s tempting to turn efforts to instill marketing analytics and a culture of acceptance into a crusade, but avoid doing so. Allowing the emotion around analytics to escalate to overt hostility simply causes opponents to dig in and resist with more vigor. Even when you face resistance, keep the olive branch extended.
• Maintain a long-term perspective. Don’t let resistance and a few setbacks discourage your efforts to engrain analytics into the marketing and corporate psyche. Mentally prepare for progress that often occurs in a “two steps forward, one step back” type of rhythm. Eventually, marketing analytics will prevail.
• Appeal to a higher power. If one of your allies is the boss, president, CEO, or owner, consider enlisting that person to help flatten the internal barriers to the analytics acceptance. This, however, is sometimes a delicate operation, as it is easily viewed as “going over someone’s head,” a move that is rarely appreciated and can burn some bridges.

Experiencing resistance to marketing analytics can make one feel like Galileo, who was persecuted for having the audacity to claim the Earth orbited the Sun. Nothing is more frustrating than having the facts and truth on your side and being met with stubborn, irrational resistance. The truth is like the force of water, capable of carving deep channels through the hardest rock. Persistence in pursuing an analytics initiative will ultimately yield the same result, eroding away the resistance to the truths it reveals.

Lack of Enthusiasm

It’s not unrealistic for an organization to have a welcoming culture and intellectual agreement with marketing analytics, but still fail to see an analytics initiative get traction and thrive. When a prosperous company hasn’t fully embraced marketing analytics, even though it is not opposed to them, more often than not the reason is because there’s little enthusiasm for doing so. To some of these organizations, analytics seems like unnecessary busywork. Because of the prosperity it is experiencing, there’s usually an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Marketing analytics is relegated to back-burner status, something that the company will get around to doing when it isn’t so busy or if it becomes really necessary.

A crisis becomes the catalyst for the adoption of marketing analytics in these companies. Organizations that feel as if they are doing fine simply don’t have the motivation to seriously pursue marketing analytics. Weaving analytics into the fabric of marketing requires a mature view of analytics as a full-time commitment, something that occurs in lean and prosperous times. An effective marketing analytics process softens the lean times and magnifies the prosperous ones, smoothing out the economic peaks and valleys.

It’s easy to understand this lack of enthusiasm for marketing analytics. What’s behind it is an attitude that parallels the view of a reasonably fit person toward exercise: there’s no compelling need as long as that person feels fine. It’s the same for companies: as long as business is reasonably good, marketing ­analytics is not a priority. There’s no disagreement about the worth of analytics, but neither is there enthusiasm for the effort involved in pursuing an initiative. The challenge is similar to that of convincing young people of the need to buy life insurance. Those with the ability to look ahead and think strategically can anticipate a day when they’ll be glad they bought life insurance. In many ways, marketing analytics is like an insurance policy, protecting marketing from the worst possible outcomes by showing it the best path to prosperity.

There’s a complacency that comes with even small degrees of corporate success. It can take hold in companies that are not achieving their objectives but perceive that they’re making progress toward them and can easily rationalize that they’re on the right path. If that path doesn’t include marketing ­analytics, it is unlikely that they will add it for a number of reasons: it’s work, they don’t understand it, they don’t know where to begin, what they’re doing now seems to be working, there are too few resources that are better invested in other activities. The list of reasons (excuses) is almost endless. It’s easy for the marketing team or the C-suite to talk themselves out of pursuing an analytics initiative.

What is ideal is for organizations, while healthy and growing, to commit to marketing analytics, gaining proficiency in the process and use of metrics during a time of strength. This kind of marketing analytics genesis works well because the process hopefully matures fast enough to help insulate the company from revenue downturns. The company that follows this path can identify alarming trends faster, have greater agility in responding to them, and do so with more authority and conviction because of the analytics process. This is the ideal scenario for birthing a marketing analytics process, but the barrier that can prevent it from occurring is satisfaction with the status quo.

It’s more likely that some crisis will cause the hasty birthing of a marketing analytics process. When this happens, there is some underlying level of desperation, and with desperation comes a lack of patience. Analytics created out of these circumstances can ultimately succeed. But it takes strong leadership to take a novice organization and have it stay the course when it is looking for instant gratification from analytics. The risk here is that what is a very good idea—marketing analytics—gets abandoned when it doesn’t immediately prove to be the salvation for a company’s woes. This impatience is exactly the reason companies should embrace marketing analytics when they don’t think they need them, so they’ll be able to leverage them when they are needed most.

As this book has described, there is a period of time required for learning, identifying proper metrics, collecting the data, and becoming proficient in its analysis. It is possible to gain some immediate benefits from marketing ­analytics, but to have the practice mature and deliver all the benefits takes time. If it takes a crisis to cause a company to embrace marketing analytics, so be it. The right view of the process is as a strategic initiative, not a tactical bandage. Marketers should take advantage of any opportunity that opens the door for analytics and move through that opening without looking back.

When complacency and satisfaction with the status quo are the issue, here are some things marketers can do to generate enthusiasm for analytics and start weaving it into the fabric of marketing:

• Accentuate the positive. While analytics can help prevent a company from going over the cliff, they can also help it climb the mountain. In the early going, emphasize metrics and analysis that lead upward. This advice in no way is meant to imply that marketing should bury its head in the sand if metrics deliver bad news. But in the early going, using metrics that drive improvements others care about generates enthusiasm.
• Come bearing gifts. Analytics data can provide invaluable insights. Marketers can share that data with those it needs as allies, helping them gain insights that are otherwise inaccessible. The caution here is not to let analytics data become a political tool, as ideally there is complete transparency throughout the organization with respect to this data. But those who aren’t familiar with how helpful such data can be should receive the gift of marketing analytics data with appropriate explanations and assistance in interpreting it.
• Practice internal public relations. It’s unreasonable to expect the organization to connect all the dots where the analytics process is concerned just from seeing the data it produces. In other words, you can’t just throw data at the organization and expect them to appreciate it. Champion the process internally by intentionally promoting its successes, even the smallest ones.
• Maintain the drumbeat. Be persistent in encouraging the practice of marketing analytics. Do this by touting the benefits, not constantly warning of the potential dire consequences of not doing so. Fear is a motivator, but not the best one.

The worst-case scenario for organizations without enthusiasm for marketing analytics is a crisis that triggers interest in them. Marketers that are not having success putting analytics on the corporate radar screen can do some background preparation, knowing that a day will come when the call goes out for the kind of help that analytics can provide.

Lack of Freedom

Is marketing more art or more science? This question has fueled plenty of debate in and outside of marketing circles for decades, and the intensity of the debated hasn’t diminished. Attempts to weave analytics into the fabric of marketing have run headlong into this debate before, and the result was often the failure of the initiative. This chapter’s previously discussed barriers of lack of direction, support, and enthusiasm can all originate from inside or outside the marketing department. The barrier of lack of freedom, however, almost always comes from within the marketing department.

In this context, freedom refers to creative freedom. Whenever there is discussion of limiting someone’s freedom, the reaction is usually swift and harsh: “over my dead body” or some similarly strong invective. Analytics are viewed as a set of shackles, constraining marketing to some cold, clinically determined path that some perceive as boring and uninspired. This is an irrational view, of course, but that doesn’t prevent some from reacting this way to the “threat” of having analytics forced on them.

The goal of this book isn’t to resolve once and for all the debate over whether marketing is science or art, but it will take a position: marketing is both. Receive with skepticism anyone who says it is all one or the other. The truth is, these two poles of marketing, although seemingly opposite, need one another and are both necessary for marketing to flourish. In fact, far from opposing one another, the creative and analytic personalities of marketing are very complementary. Effective CMOs understand the need for balance between these forces and intentionally manage them to proper levels to drive the maximum marketing contribution.

Imagine marketing that was almost entirely a product of analytics, with creativity playing a minor, supporting role at best. This scenario conjures up thoughts of unspectacular marketing assets that produce consistent, predictable, and incremental results from such an effort. The metrics are in the driver’s seat determining what marketing does.

On the other end of this spectrum, imagine marketing that is entirely a creative venture, with analytics playing the minor supporting role. Here the results are more hit or miss. The assets are almost always dazzling, innovative, and even edgy. But these assets don’t always work. Sometimes the outcome of creativity is a smash hit, and other times a dud. Here marketing is riding the results roller coaster, experiencing plenty of highs and lows. Marketing vacillates between being the hero and the scapegoat. Creativity is in the driver’s seat determining what marketing does.

Neither of the scenarios in the previous two paragraphs represent the place marketing should live. Historically, marketing has lived much more on the creative side of the spectrum, and that is one reason the greatest resistance to analytics often comes from within the marketing department. If the truth be told, creativity been used to deflect the pressure to adopt analytics within the marketing function. George Torok, marketing expert and speaker, weighs in with these thoughts: “I believe that many marketers try to portray marketing as art when they can't measure their results. Hence they give up responsibility for their marketing programs. They suggest that marketing is all chance. Many self-declared branding experts talk about the art of branding and refuse to face the science of measurement. Don't be fooled by that hocus pocus.”⁴

There is a balance and order to maintain between the analytical and creative personalities of (and in) marketing. It starts with creating the understanding that great marketing is the result of properly combining science and art. There’s actually a lot of common ground on which the adherents of marketing analytics and the creative marketing types can stand. The creative process in marketing has long been an adaptation of the scientific method, something many marketers may not realize. Their creative ideas represent a hypothesis. The development of those ideas into campaigns and assets represent experiments from which they make observations to determine if the hypothesis was true, or if there is a need for a different hypothesis. Marketing analytics can step onto this stage and contribute a significantly better understanding of how true these hypotheses are.

Marketing analytics isn’t a creativity killer. If it is, then its implementation and management is flawed. Analytics and creativity should have a symbiotic relationship in the marketing organization, where the analytics point to areas in need of more creativity, and where creativity is measured to understand the value it provides. Where analytics and creativity are concerned, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

As the barriers discussed in this chapter illustrate, weaving analytics into the fabric of marketing requires patience and persistence. Building the analytics process on the company’s values and vision provides the foundation and direction the initiative needs to start and succeed. Those who champion marketing analytics should expect some resistance in one or more of the areas discussed in this chapter. A patient approach that persistently emphasizes the success of analytics will ultimately win over the doubters.

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¹Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 3.

²Chris Mooney, “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science,” Mother Jones, May/June 2011. See http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney.

³Ibid.

⁴George Torok, “Marketing—Art or Science?” See http://www.torok.com/articles/marketing/MarketingArtorScience.html.