Technical jargon: What does "empiricism" actually mean?

The entire industry seems to be infected by data fever. Marketing is on its way to becoming a science and everyone is feverishly chasing after it. Suddenly, it's no longer the target groups, ideas or measures that are being scrutinized in Q&A sessions after presentations, but the new questions are: "What are the data points?", "What about data ownership?" or rarely "What insights do we get from the collected data?" Media experts and agency managers are starting to rant about data-driven marketing, programmatic advertising, descriptive analytics and much more - but wait! It's not that the people on the client side know better. Even with them, you sometimes get the feeling that it's more about buzzword-mongering than knowledge.

Marketing comes of age

Marketing used to be a matter of taste. Customers either "liked" an idea or they didn't. Those were the wild years of advertising, which are still consumed today by young advertisers on Netflix and other disruptive channels. Yesterday, marketing was parascience. Professors such as Kotler, Malik, Braun and co. shaped entire generations with their theories of what marketing is, should and can be, but today theories are history because they are simply too general. And tomorrow, empiricism will dominate our industry. Empiricism, or 'empirical knowledge', is the methodical and systematic collection of data and the findings that are drawn from it. We are already well advanced with the first part: mountains of data are being amassed. But the right conclusions are rarely drawn from it, at least not by people, and the big data providers from the internet and social media offer services that present such mountains beautifully. But only a few can climb them - the industry lacks the ability to a) read, b) understand and c) correctly analyze the data. Because when clients and agencies analyze charts with countless data curves and points together today, they still look like two blind men telling each other a movie.

*Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He created the section "Vom Fach" in the NZZ FOLIO and was in charge of it for years. He presents and decodes words and terms that can be used either for small talk, being important, getting excited, playing Scrabble or simply for fun.