Customer science is just horse shit
Aarron Spinley is a Fellow at the Field Bell Institute. Here, he tackles the increasingly popular argument that customer science is nothing but a steaming load.
I was pressed quite hard the other week. Someone had the temerity to tell me that a scientific approach to managing the customers of a business, is, and I quote, “just horseshit”.
I say, temerity, of course, because I wrote a book on the subject and teach a class on it, so he was having a right old go. But just as you could see the wind really fill their sails and the chest puff out, it all collapsed in a moment. Right after I agreed with him.
Many people get confused by terms like ‘customer science’. They assume it to be some abstract and academic petri dish approach to a field that is full of nuance, culture, and context. Hardly the stuff of zeros and ones, or physics, they say. It wasn’t that long ago that Mark Ritson said: “We’ve been having a debate about whether marketing is science for about 50 years. And the recurring answer is ‘no’”.
Of course, the bedside manner of a doctor represents soft skills, and applied judgement. But the field of medicine is still a science. Conversely, the design of a house relies on physics and mathematics. But the building industry is not generally regarded as a field of science at all. Our application of the term is somewhat, fluid, shall we say. I should hasten to add that Ritson now happily endorses many aspects of marketing science.
