Jumpstart Automotive Group

I’m afraid that our growing focus on data collection, management, and analysis is occasionally misguided and counter productive. Certainly some shopping and purchase behaviors are rational and can be understood in terms of a causal relationship. Direct response marketers understand this and depend on their ability to adjust their marketing mix to improve performance. When a company is selling magazine subscriptions, iPhone apps, soda, or movie tickets, the shopping and purchase cycles are short. The level of sales engagement is low. It’s relatively simple and quick to evaluate consumer response and adjust accordingly.

Big-ticket items, goods and services that are purchased less frequently are more difficult to market. Relationships are less causal and more complex. People come to market less frequently. They take longer to evaluate their alternatives and they rely on a greater array of marketing inputs, including the quality of salesmanship encountered at point of purchase. The idea that a single 30-second television commercial drives a consumer to a dealership to buy a car is nonsense. Between the time a particular consumer purchased their last car and the time they decide they would like a new one might be five years. It might be ten. In that time, that consumer would have been exposed to thousands of marketing messages and experiences. New technology would have been introduced. They would have talked with neighbors, friends, and associates. They would have ridden in friends’ cars.

How are the Marketing VP, Ad Manager, or Account Director supposed to evaluate the performance of their most recent TV commercial? Is copy-testing the answer? Is the most appropriate metric ninety-day sales? What about brand favorability or purchase intent? What about print? What’s the appropriate measure for evaluating the performance of the print campaign? What about digital?

This is where we get into dangerous territory. The data is overwhelming. We can precisely measure how many “uniques” were exposed to our digital display advertising. We know exactly how many search ads were run. We can tell how many clicks were achieved. We might know how many clicks resulted in key buying activities such as requesting a brochure, asking for a price, comparison shopping, or finding a local dealer. The problem is that these actions don’t exist in isolation. Site traffic and on-line consumer shopping behavior are profoundly influenced by all of the marketing activities experienced by the consumer over an extended period of time.

Today’s marketers need to be careful what is measured and what inferences are made from those measurements. The purpose of analyzing data is to develop insight and gain deeper understanding. Unfortunately, we often mistake information for knowledge. A gifted researcher encountered this problem in a different field many years ago. His perspective is equally compelling today.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ Albert Einstein