What does the art and science of marketing really mean? Your thoughts?

The phrase “art and science” of marketing gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean? What exactly is the art part of marketing, and what is the science? Where are the boundaries between them? Do they overlap?

These are some of the questions that Mayur Gupta, global VP of marketing & growth at Spotify, and I will be addresing in the opening keynote of the MarTech conference in San Francisco this May.

(As a reminder, the early bird “beta rate” for MarTech tickets expires this coming Saturday, April 1 — yes, really, April 1. Here’s an in-depth preview of the entire 2-day event.)

The framework at the top of this post is a rough draft of examining the yin-and-yang of intuitive vs. analytical approaches to marketing and management that I noodled about with Gord Hotchkiss (who will also be speaking at MarTech on AI and the B2B buyer’s journey) about four years ago.

It’s not quite the same thing as the art vs. science dichotomy — is it? — but it helps one appreciate the valuable interplay between supposedly opposing perspectives.

We’d love to hear what you think on this subject. Please take this short survey on the art and science of marketing. We’ll share the results with everyone here as well as incorporate them into our MarTech presentation. I think it will be really fascinating to see the spectrum of how our profession collectively looks at the balance of these worldviews.

Thank you — and I hope to see you in San Francisco in May!