Tuesday, 17 July 2012

Ten rules of marketing analysis

It's been a while since we had a top ten on Wallpapering Fog. Number one on this list came up (again) today, so let's have Wallpapering Fog's top ten rules of marketing analysis.
  1. If you think you've discovered a radical, unexpected, new result that nobody's ever noticed before, your data is wrong.

  2. More complicated analysis can help you measure your marketing much more accurately. But if simple analysis can't find any impact at all from a marketing campaign, then there probably wasn't one.

  3. Nobody ever abandons a campaign that doesn't work, the first time that you prove it doesn't work. Three is the magic number.

  4. ROI means return on investment and it's measured in money. Not clicks, likes, web traffic or re-tweets.

  5. If you're not selling ice-cream, then the weather isn't responsible for your 50% year on year sales decline. Even Noah needed food and clothes.

  6. Never trust a piece of research that was funded by a media owner.

  7. Ten thousand respondents is plenty. A million is very rarely necessary - it just takes much longer to open the spreadsheet. You only need a spoonful of soup to know what the whole bowl tastes like.

  8. That means the BARB TV ratings panel is fine. Leave it alone, online people.

  9. When forecasting next year's sales, assume that your new adverts aren't any better than your old adverts. I'm sorry if that's depressing, but it's almost always true.

  10. The world is never changing so fast that you can't learn something from the past couple of years. People's basic motivations haven't changed since the dark ages.

1 comment:

Tom Lloyd said...

The most common sense I have heard all year...thank you for the dose of sanity