How Is A Scientific Marketing Plan Developed?

A scientific marketing plan starts with an observation.

For example, analyst company Intellidyn recently gathered data about thousands of North Americans. From this data, the company realized that people over the age of 64, married couples, ex-military individuals, and farmers are highly likely to want to travel to Asia. Because of this information, a vacation package company marketed their Asian vacation packages to those who fit this profile, and saw an increase in their sales as a result.

Once an observation is made, the hypothesis can be created from this information.

For example, online companies such as Amazon.com collect data about what individuals look at online and what they purchase. They then make a hypothesis about what that person is likely to purchase in the future. If a customer searches a book by a certain author, Amazon.com considers it a strong possibility that they might be interested in buying another book by the same author and suggest more books by that author to that person. This is where “Personalized Marketing” comes into play. 

Personalized marketing is the ultimate form of targeted marketing, creating messages for individual consumers. That said, it is most often an automated process, using computer software to craft the individual messages, and building customer-centric recommendation engines instead of company-centric selling engines.

Companies then experiment based on their observation and hypothesis. For example, a phone company might analyze user records and see that households with heavy phone use between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. are more likely to have teenagers. The company can then launch a marketing campaign to those homes, advertising a special deal on additional phones and lines for the home.