This morning, I read this excellent NYT article, "Making Health Care Better", by David Leonhardt. Although the article deals with something (almost) completely different, it reminded me of the increasingly mentioned need for measurement and empirical evidence of selected brand solutions in the marketing industry.
A far-fetched analogy? Perhaps. But it does tackle the "intuition" vs. "empiricism" approaches to the way we solve client's problems - in marketing. More often than not, in the absence of empirical criteria (or because of our unwillingness to look for it), we rely on our intuitive reasoning instead of on the observation.
And more often than not, we judge the work of others based on our taste, intuition, and relationships we have with those who made that work.
And that's the problem. According to the article, "Intuition is not simply belief; it springs from this knowledge. A doctor making an intuitive diagnosis is doing so on the basis of thousands of hours spent treating patients. The problem, however, is that the mind is not particularly good at sorting through this knowledge and weighing different parts appropriately. We give too much weight to information that confirms our suspicions or that is highly memorable."
How can we then decide that a campaign was "better" than another one? We rarely look at a campaign data - partly because the actual metrics data is proprietary and not available to anyone beyond walls of an agency and of their clients. What we do is rely on our experience.
But ... "When a person says, ‘In my experience,’ what’s actually happening is you’re being dominated by one or two recent cases that you can recall or by some distant case that was either particularly good or particularly bad." Famous behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman claims that "Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. The feedback needs to come quickly and to be clear."
General, and generally available, feedback mechanisms and benchmarks for success don't really exist. While it may not have been possible before to know exactly if a TV/print/outdoors/radio campaign influenced particular brand affinity and purchase decisions, digital lets us do things differently.
This means that we don't have to judge works of others purely on elusive criteria of "creativity", but on actual data on how this creativity fared with people (what did they do? and what did they do next?). It's not that we don't talk about this stuff - we may even be talking too much. The problem is that we don't do enough about it:
"The explosion of medical research over the last century has produced a dizzying number of treatments for different ailments. To enter mainstream use, any such treatment typically needs to clear a high bar. It will be subject to randomized trials, statistical-significance tests, the peer-review process of academic journals and the scrutiny of government regulators. Yet once a treatment enters the mainstream — once we know whether it works in certain situations — science is largely left behind. The next questions — when to use it and on which patients — become matters of judgment, not measurement. The decision is, once again, left to a doctor’s informed intuition."
And then, there's aversion to criticism. (Unfortunately, not everyone reacts like Alex Bogusky to a critique. I thought his humility is a great example: "I was just so excited to have a review in LA Times that the fact that it was harsh didn't really hurt my feelings much. To survive 20+ years in the advertising industry, my feelings dried up and blew away long ago. I do miss them. But without feelings in the way it was easy to appreciate how lucky I was to even get reviewed.") The rest of us, however, often choose to ignore - or worse yet, devalue - anything that suggest an alternative:
"The journal Health Affairs will soon publish a survey of the chairmen of more than 700 hospitals. Its main message is that many hospitals are not even aware of what they do well and what they don’t. The physicians who conducted the survey, Ashish Jha and Arnold Epstein, gave the chairmen a list of issues — including financial performance, organizational strategy and the quality of health care — and asked them to name their board’s two top priorities. Roughly half did not name the quality of care. Yet the chairmen said they believed that the care at their hospitals was above average. Even at those hospitals that Medicare data suggest are among the worst in the country, 58 percent of the chairmen said they thought their hospital was above average. Not a single one said the hospital was below average."
Turns out, the main problem is not admitting that we can do our job better. The problem is pretending that we can't.
