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I've always found that people have a hard time accepting that with marketing, data really only tells you what happened. It doesn't tell WHY something happened.

I also find (as you allude to) that as much as people want to be 'data driven,' they will conveniently ignore all available data if it suits their purpose.

> If the marketers have to appear (or actually be) addicted to data to communicate well with the rest of their company, then so be it.

I came to the same conclusion. Fortunately, collecting and storing the data is pretty easy, so I do so once a quarter and move on with my life.

> And you know what? I think that's OK. Marketing works, and it's a critical component of any company. A lot of good marketing isn't trackable, because it plants a seed inside a person's head far before that person buys anything. It tells a compelling story. The world is full of data-addicted PMs and sales VPs and ad purchasers and CEOs, but good marketing is more than that.

But how do you know it works if you can't track it?

I get your point about it being more than hyper-focused short term metrics, but how do you actually know it's working if you can't quantify it? Imagine if Tesla spent a ton of money on advertising (compared to the $0 they currently spend), would people not just assume the strong brand is tied to whatever marketing campaign might exist?

I am not in marketing (although I have had to do limited marketing in the past), but it feels like most of it is just carried along by cargo-culting and inertia. Similar to how everyone wants to be like Google so they copy their interview process, their monorepo, and other things without actually understanding why Google does that. Obviously some people are great at marketing but I'm not convinced most marketing money is actually seeing a positive ROI. That said, I'm genuinely happy to be proven wrong.

> I get your point about it being more than hyper-focused short term metrics, but how do you actually know it's working if you can't quantify it?

There are always going to be ways to measure things, they're just going to be more or less fuzzy than what we're used to (even if what we're used to is wrong).

But how do they measure those things, fuzzy or not? And more importantly, can they actually invalidate their own hypotheses?

On your B2B contact us form, ask 'how did you hear about us', or do it as part of the onboarding.

When people leave, ask them where they're going, and where they heard about them.

Etc. Are you going to get acurate and complete data? No to both. But you might get actionable data. Will you get real-time feedback? Nope.

Some things are worth doing even if you can't scientifically prove that they are.

But you don't know which ones are. Which means you're wasting money on those that aren't.

Even if you think you know, do you really?

Attribution is a notoriously tricky issue and it's only getting harder with GDPR and browsers making changes to cookies.

It's not because you can't measure it that it's not scientific (and vice versa).

> But how do you know it works if you can't track it?

We can track what zero marketing does vs some: companies with marking sell more product. Most bad marketing is more successful than zero marketing as to be worth it. There are enough metrics to track this.

Is Tesla still making them as fast as they can? You don't need marketing if you don't have the supply.

Demand is affected by price. If marketing increased demand they could sell the same number of units for a higher price.

...and possibly with less profit, because marketing would eat away at the margins.

They'd have to raise prices just to keep the margins the same.

The important question is how much demand does each dollar of marketing create. It would be poor decision-making to just assume marketing is a bad idea because they are already able to sell through everything at current prices. Presumably there’s somebody doing that math at the company.

I think there’s two parts.

One is table stakes. What is the ROI of a website? Of showing up in Google organically? Of a well designed logo? On some level, customers expect to be able to find you. You need to show up, and show up well, at the point that customers are simply exploring. That’s fairly untraceable.

The other is distribution, holistically. Tesla might not have “marketing,” but they have showrooms, launch events, and referral programs. Every successful business started with precisely one highly effective way to acquire customers. Marketing, on some level, is about making sure that acquisition channel is working, start to end.

As companies grow, everything becomes muddy. Sure, Tesla or Walmart or whoever is probably unable to undertake how their marketing is effective, but they also can’t attribute success to every engineering project or accounting effort. That’s normal and true everywhere.

"What is the ROI of...a well designed logo?" For me (a consumer), absolutely zero. What do I care what some company's logo is? I don't, and I also doubt that I recognize most of them.

Perhaps you've seen the images of fake pennys, like this: https://technicallyeclectic.com/video-best-practices-details.... If so, you know what I mean; you could show me a hundred logos, and I couldn't tell you which ones are real, much less which of those real ones belong to which company.

And yet many companies spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide what the best logo is, and then a few years later they decide to "refresh" it, or "clean it up", or "give it a facelift." To which I say, waste of time.

So you're saying the Nike logo means nothing to you?

A sample size of one, but, I was able to pick out the correct penny immediately, and coincidentally, I work in marketing (but more technical marketing than anything brand-related).

In defense of the brand folks I know, I don't think any of them would say that the ROI from a well-designed logo is your ability to pick it out against a fake one. Sure, a poorly-designed logo would be one you would not be able to recall, but maximizing ROI from a logo is not maximizing your recall of it.

When my company rolled out a new logo a few years ago, some of the biggest selling points were making it consistent and easy to use, particularly in conjunction with our product names, which reduced time spent by marketers working around a hard-to-design-around logo. It also focused on make our workmark clearer, which was a real issue because even a large number of our own employees mistyped our company name as CamelCase instead of two words, which has real implications for trademark defense.

Yeah, sometimes logo refreshes are unnecessary. But not always. More often than not _you_ are not the end user benefiting from the changes.

Revenue attribution is even more of a mess now with Apple's ITP.

You're absolutely right to say that good marketing still happens despite bad data.

Only Nike and Red bull are really progressing marketing by innovating culture. Nike is creating trillion dollar economies by introducing the hijab for women which leads to more equality and stronger women with more money to spend on Nike gear.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Public%...

How can you tell good marketing from bad?

> Good marketing can still happen with bad data.

Good marketing doesnt have to look like trash though. I remember there were times when ads were sometimes great stuff aesthetically and artistically. I wish they didn't just give that money to google and we didnt have to tolerate uninspired ads.

Is that attributation problem applicable to B2B where most buying decisions are well considered, unlike B2C ?

So the best you can do via ads is to show your offer to the right guy, and that's enough to be considered ?

I’d frame it slightly differently; it’s not exactly “the right guy.” B2B marketing is frequently about getting a critical mass of people at a company to come to consensus. The best strategy here is frequently getting 1 person very excited and 10 people aware enough to not pitch a fit when they hear a deal is happening.

The best B2-large-B marketing strategy I ever heard was fundamentally account-based. This guy sold a $1m+ product, and he had a list of the 1,000 companies that could possible afford it. His metrics revolved around a hierarchy of countries > sales territories > accounts. He’d literally evaluate programs based on “have we scheduled enough demos with IBM this quarter?” If the answer was no, they’d run a smaller campaign focused on just the accounts they were behind on. Sales loved him.

The hard part about attribution is so much of the internal discussion is opaque. So especially in large accounts, you have to develop some feel for what is “enough” activity in an account that sales won’t have a hard time of it.

(And fwiw, you don’t have to do this through pure marketing. Bottoms-up products aka freemium is a great signal that sales should reach out — Datadog, New Relic, Github, and more do this.)