How Marketing Science Drives Marketing Creativity

Marketing success, according to marketing scientist Peter Hammer, means challenging your assumptions with some solid research.

Marketing has always been seen as a creative field. Marketing science, however, asks whether in an era of constant data streams and fierce competition, you can really afford to ignore the numbers.

Success, according to marketing scientist Peter Hammer, means challenging your assumptions with some solid research.

“There’s a really interesting conversation happening around the role of science in the marketing world,” said Peter Hammer, managing director of Marketing Scientist Group. “In the scheme of things, science is a relatively new thing into marketing. … Marketing science is ultimately about trying to help us understand how marketing works, how brands grow, how customers buy.”

Hammer began his career at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the time its director, Byron Sharp, wrote the game-changing book “How Brands Grow.” Hammer has also worked at Yahoo7 as the head of insights and analytics, and now runs the Marketing Scientist Group. All of his experience has led him to one particular insight: Scientific knowledge is always growing and changing, so you must, too.

“One of the big principles in marketing has been around segmentation and who are the other kinds of buyers that you should focus on,” he said. “Traditionally, we’ve been told that we should focus on really high-value customers that buy from us often, but actually the research and the marketing laws that have come out of the work at Ehrenberg-Bass really shows … you should be focusing on the light or infrequent customers of the category because that’s the way you’re going to grow a brand.”

To quote another podcast we love, Science Vs , there are feelings … And then there’s science. Update your knowledge of both with Hammer and host Mark Jones on this episode of The CMO Show.