Has marketers’ pre-occupation with ‘numbers’ led to one of the most important elements in marketing being overlooked?

The impressive facts, figures and analytics that have come with digital marketing have driven a focus on ‘performance marketing’. Performance tracking tools have helped justify an increase in marketing budgets, as the rationale for the increase could be based on ‘real world’ empirical evidence. However, most of the additional marketing budget has been allocated to ‘last click’ channels, simply because the ‘last click’ is given credit for a sale or conversion.

Being able to attribute and analyse where marketing successes come from, and having the opportunity to enhance performance is, of course, a good thing. It’s what helps drive improvement. However, it is incredibly easy to forget that ultimately we’re talking about people, not numbers.

Is the human element of marketing being missed at the expense of ‘metrics’ and the ‘short termism’ of last click attribution?

There’s no doubt that much more marketing investment has been made in digital marketing rather than in ‘brand’. In some respects it’s not hard to see why. Performance driven by investment in the ‘brand’ (building an emotional connection with customers) is nowhere as easy to measure as visible and ‘deliverable’ short term performance metrics.

This focus on ‘metrics’ is evidenced by increasingly common phrases used in marketing such as ‘data-driven marketing’, ‘data analytics’ and ‘marketing attribution’. 

• Humans still rely heavily on emotions when making decisions.
• Most of the purchase decisions people make are emotional, not practical.
• Choosing one product over another is ultimately powered by the consumer’s emotional relationship with the brand.

In his book, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing  author Douglas Van Praet observes “The most startling truth is we don’t even think our way to logical solutions. Emotions don’t hinder decisions. They constitute the foundation on which they’re made!”

Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman identified that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious and that when marketing a product to a consumer, it’s most effective to target the subconscious mind.

So, has marketers’ pre-occupation with the ‘metrics’ led to one of the most crucial, influential elements of marketing – emotion – being neglected or even overlooked?

Is the link between brand and performance being missed because of the temptation to focus on ‘deliverable’ short term performance metrics rather than invest in the brand (because the outcomes are not so easily measured)?

Whatever the answer to these questions, they raise the importance of ‘emotional intelligence’ in marketing and the crucial role it has to play in influencing buying decisions.

• Bruce Buchanan the CEO of ROKT, in an article in the Harvard Business Review, identified companies with strong brands (organisations that have good emotional connections with their customers) outperform weaker brands in the same industry by 3:1 in terms of customer acquisition costs.

In a recent study by Deloitte Digital

• Of the 62% of consumers surveyed who said they felt a relationship with a brand, 76% went on to say that they have used that brand for four years or more because of the trust they have in it.
• 44% of those surveyed endorse a product based on emotional criteria. And, in these recommendations, 60% of customers tend to use language such as “love,” “happy” or “adore,” typically reserved for family or friends.