Data, Common Sense & Stupidity (Part 1: When Common Sense Prevails)
“There’s no way this is right. You know I’m a key player in this market and what we see is different from what your data is saying. Your data is wrong.”
The data let us down and we looked stupid:
The client is livid. We had convinced her to spend USD5,000 on the data we built our strategy on and, at this point, she’s very sure that the data and our strategy are nonsense. No amount of rationalizing is winning her over. She ends the meeting abruptly and decides to proceed without us.
Yes, the data didn’t make sense when we first saw it, but we insist on evidence-based strategy and we trust our data and data sources, so we stuck by it. Unfortunately, common sense prevailed and we were left looking stupid.
That early morning call
It’s too early for client calls, but I go ahead and pick it. She’s excited; she’s convinced proceeding without us was a good decision, so she’s filling me in on all that’s happened without us.
After struggling to make in-roads in Accra, burning lots of cash and getting battered badly, common sense had again led her to steer clear of Accra and things had suddenly started going well.
She’s gloating and I’m surprised—she doesn’t realize she’s actually started seeing results because she’s inadvertently taken the approach our data and strategy suggested—the data and strategy she rejected months earlier.
So what had made such sound data look so stupid
The data said the brand we see most people buying—the one dominating every corner shop, supermarket and table-top around us—wasn’t the market leader. It defied common sense.
But here is the catch; interrogate the data further and you’d realize that the brand that had engulfed us and significantly dominated every aspect of our lives was only dominant in Accra, Tema, and other metropolises along Ghana’s coast. Move further inland and its presence as well as its aggressive marketing wanes quickly.
As a result, our advice was to steer clear of the aggressive dominant player in the coastal areas and rather go after the market leader whose market dominance was based on having a captive market in the relatively less competitive hinterland.
The market leader has very little fighting power compared to the one dominating the coastal regions—succeed first at dislodging the nonbelligerent market leader before allocating part of your ROI to tackling the menacing aggressive player along the coast.
Unfortunately this only made sense to the client after her attempts to gain market share in Accra had almost obliterated her, leaving her clutching at straws.
Common sense is not always your best friend
In the almost twenty years that we have been operating in the marketing, marketing communications and advertising space, we have seen this occur countless times. The data points in a ridiculous direction, your gut is to defy it. Defying it makes you feel like you are in control. Defying it aligns with sound reasoning so you go ahead and defy it.
We’ve seen projects stall because of this. We’ve seen founders lose or almost lose their entire business. We’ve seen fingers burnt badly because marketing communications and advertising feels like something anyone with common sense can easily do, not something to be driven by sound data and strategy.
The sad truth is that marketing, marketing communications and advertising decisions have long tails, most of its impact isn’t immediate. The impact is often further down the line after it has guzzled cash, making course correction extremely expensive or even impossible at that point.
Our take? As long as the data is from a reliable source, ignore your guts, get all the emotions out of the way and interrogate the data further. A few questions would most probably reveal why the facts on the ground are far from what you thought they were. Once you get to this point, go ahead and do the seemingly stupid things the data is directing you to do.
