6 - Clients Get Hung Up on a Number

Summary

Having described the general organizational culture at Super and the working practices in the research team, in this chapter we will look at the relationship between the research team and their clients. Specifically, I want to explore the ways that the research team talk about their clients in the course of their work and consider what this tells us about the service that the research team thinks it provides for their clients. In keeping with our earlier discussions of discourses of Marketing Art and Marketing Science in marketing action, we might expect that they either emphasize their creativity and imagination or their ability to produce truthful, objective, and robust information.

My argument is that the research team at Super act on a more sophisticated understanding of their clients as organizational decision- makers. Their action is based on the idea that their clients need help making decisions. This is not a matter of telling them what to do – whether that is justified through scientific methods or artistic innovation. Rather, the research team seek to increase their clients’ ability to make decisions. They do so by providing them with simple accounts of their markets and consumers that facilitate clients’ decisions by aligning their clients’ pre- existing assumptions and enrolling a wider network of symbolic and economic resources to support them.

I began to recognize this as I witnessed the research team describing their products to internal stakeholders. In a presentation to the sales team, for example, Dan explains why the research team have modified an element of their Virality product – the predictive algorithm for what is called the Virality EQ score – away from offering concrete predictions. Previously, Virality EQ predicted the ‘share rate’ for an online advert based on its performance in a test market. A Virality EQ of 2 per cent meant that the client could expect 2 per cent of viewers to share their advert among their social networks. The problem, Dan explains in the presentation, is that this number is taken too literally by clients. ‘We have been burned by predicting a share rate that did not occur. Clients can get hung up on achieving a number and we can get our fingers burnt’, Dan tells the audience. The new method ‘mitigates against this’, he continues. It does so by offering a number that is far less exact.