The Ironic Mistakes Marketers Make - Brand Quarterly

Here are a couple of ironic mistakes that marketers make: they put too much trust in careful iteration, and they put too much trust in'human creativity.' Marketers assume that the ability to A/B test content makes them scientists, edging closer to a deep truth about their audiences. They assume that the process of analysing audience reactions to the brand's owned content will give them an in-depth picture of that audience: that they can A/B test their way to a meaningful relationship. This is a mistake; because you can only learn more about the hypothesis your experiment is designed to test. If your experiment is designed to test only within the narrow parameters of your product, category or competitors, then you are really testing only a very limited micropart of that audience's interests. For example, if you are Oral B and your content talks about toothbrushes, those people can only ever really give you feedback based on content about toothbrushes, which is a very narrow picture of who Oral B truly is.