Where Science and Art Meet
Last night I decided to make Yorkshire pudding for the first time. Oh, you don’t know what that is? Well, let me tell you.
Basically, you fill a muffin pan with a high-heat oil and after 15 minutes, pour a mixture of egg and flour in. After you’ve baked that for another 25 minutes, the dough starts to rise from the bottom and create what looks like a mini toasted dough tsunami around each cup. It’s kind of hard to visualize, but Jamie Oliver makes the whole ordeal look so fantastically simple (although, I think that’s part of his brand appeal).
Easy enough, right? No. Anyone who has ever been a novice baker for more time than they’d like to be knows that nothing is as easy as it seems—no matter how many confident chuckles you get from this Oliver guy. Sometimes it feels like it takes a magic formula to successfully pull things off in the delicate science of baking.
We don’t even know what this is, but we know it’s not as easy as it looks. (Photo by Burst)
In marketing (as in baking) there’s always some tried-and-tested recipe that people say works. It comes with the kind of directions that seem too easy to mess up. When it comes down to it, marketing is based on science, but it’s still pretty easy to screw up. Why is that?
The perfect recipe really takes only a little bit of science and a much heftier serving of art. When you’re baking a cake the first few times, you can basically follow simple directions to ensure the measurements come out right. However, once you’ve done it a few times, you start to see opportunities to put your own personal touch on things to tailor each recipe to the situation. What works for one cake, might not work for another (and some people really just prefer ice cream).
Marketing holds much of the same. If you keep up all your old tricks—never reinventing the wheel—your competitors will be churning out a better product before you know it. Plus, not every client wants the same recipe. It helps to have a knowledge of the basics before you can afford to get a little more creative.
Maybe you like fluffier cake. Maybe you like flakier crust. If you follow the same recipe everyone else does and think you’ll win every time, you’ll come out disappointed. One day, you’ll meet the perfect cake, and the person who made it will tell you they did so through trial and error—not from a recipe.
Baking for the first time will make you feel like you’re five years old again! (Photo by Burst)
In an article in Entrepreneur on this very subject, George Deeb talks about how there’s now a trend in marketing where “data is king.” It’s almost as if marketers stopped thinking for themselves and just became hypnotized by information. He says, “So, yes, data is really important for your business. But, which data points you manage towards, and how you study the data, can make or break your success.”
Like Chief Marketer has stated before, and something we’ve known to be true in advertising: there has to be more that’s revealed behind a data point. You might be a brand with a whole bank of data, but if you don’t know how to parce out the information (how to combine the ingredients effectively) your cake is going to suck.
Sorry. It’s true.
In their article, they note:
“For as much as we would like to turn our marketing efforts into a science, it is still very much an art, knowing the right probing questions to ask and still following your internal gut.”
When you take that cake to the dinner party, you want people to remember it. Beyond that, you want people to remember that you made it. That usually requires a little something extra. Simon Sinek has echoed this in his writing about marketing best practices, as well as in this TED talk. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” he says.
Jenna Gross, CMO of Moving Targets, a marketing agency focused on forging stronger relationships between businesses & their communities, puts things straight in her Forbes article when she says we need to understand that creative leads and data guides.
We tend to get hung up on the directions and forget about enterprise—or even context. If you’re about to make a pie crust and you really need it to come out flaky instead of crisp, it’s going to matter whether that butter just sat out on your counter for an hour in a kitchen that’s 90º F degrees or one that’s 40º F degrees. How long and how fast you whisk the batter can also make a difference.
To give you another bad metaphor: an escalator is just a stairwell if you take away the innovation for it to move.
Gross says:
“When venturing into a new market, data can predict how the product or service will be received and type of message that will resonate most. But without strong creative, the campaign will fall flat.
When you’re looking for a new audience for your service or product, brand awareness campaigns are critical. The ingredient that’s going to set you apart is not the same as what everyone else used. Public attention calls for much more creativity in a saturated market.
That’s like thinking you can just Betty Crocker-your-way to success without ever having to make something from scratch. There isn’t always going to be directions on the side of the box and you aren’t going to have perfectly prepackaged and pre-measured ingredients included. You might actually have to figure out how to make those super gooey brownies all on your own.
Plus, brownies from a box are always going to taste less awesome than ones made fresh with genuine ingredients.
It’s about making art out of science (Photo courtesy of Burst)
Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to in baking, as is true in marketing. However, it’s the practice that helps you stumble upon those little accidents that become your new favorite recipe. Progress doesn’t happen without a few mistakes first and ideas don’t become famous if they aren’t shared. Creativity is a breeding ground for experiments that deviate from the norm. It’s in the evolution of things that change begins to formulate and improvements are slowly made.
In other words, play around with that recipe after you understand the science behind it. Either that, or hire somebody who knows what they’re doing to swoop in and save the day.
So, how did my Yorkshire pudding turn out after all of that? It was basically a half-formed puff sitting atop a sopping wet grease puddle. Don’t ask me what I did wrong, because I fear I still have a couple of tries until I find out.
Not everyone can be Julia Child, but if you have a very good reason for doing things differently it will make the experience just that much more memorable. Possibly, delicious.