9 - Artistic Qualification

Summary

Having seen how scientific discourse and artefacts displayed at Super create a space for the research team to conduct marketing outsight, in this chapter we will look in more detail at the techniques of interpretation through which the research team tell stories. In a client presentation, Joanne describes the research team's work as being focused on ‘giving meaning to data’. This marks another surprising revelation from the field as it suggests that the research team, and their clients, understand their work as a process that goes beyond and adds something to the data they have collected. For me, it marks an acknowledgement that their work is structured around the discourse of Marketing Art.

My central claim is, then, that despite the computational techniques, data science, and scientific themes displayed to clients, the ways that marketing researchers engage with all this data is far from scientific. Rather, interpretation is a process I call artistic qualification. It involves the use of intuition and imagination to pick the right story and assign meaning to particular elements of a dataset. Through this, the research team is able to offer simplified accounts of consumers and markets that combine clients’ interests and expectations alongside Super's own business needs. They mix their understandings of clients with concerns relating to their careers, the demands placed on them by their organization, as well as industry and cultural trends. In short, while scientism, particularly the specific scientism of computationality, helps to build clients’ confidence, it is through these more artistic activities that market researchers take the next step in uncertainty absorption.

In this sense, artistic qualification has more in common with postmodernism than positivism. But it is not a matter of making things up. There are symbolic tools that the research team use to ensure their artistic interpretations absorb uncertainty by relating to the data and to their audiences. This is where, in other words, marketing science turns into marketing science fiction.

We will observe the process of artistic qualification at work in this chapter through the concepts of ‘the stat’ and ‘the headline’. The stat is a key number that the research team want their clients to focus on from a research project. The stat gains significance in relation to a short, qualifying description, known as the headline.