Don Draper is the lead character from AMC's mid-century advertising drama, "Mad Men." For those not familiar with the series, Don pulls in big advertising consulting fees for delivering suave, charismatic pitches for consumer products. While hailed as a genius or a guru, it's not really clear, as McAfee points out, that Don actually generates a positive ROI for his clients.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="Got an ROI for that, Don?"]
[/caption]McAfee proposes that companies are moving towards a more data driven decisionmaking model, even when it comes to more historically fuzzy areas like advertising and marketing. He cites the major hurdle to this more data-sensitive model as mostly culture oriented - that is, companies often don't have the true organizational and political will to run experiments and find out the truth. They often decide what to do, then marshal "facts" and arguments to support the pre-made decision.
While I don't disagree with this, I think there is another issue at play here, and it's demonstrated by the positive example he cites of Staples office supply using the market research company Affinnova to help determine which packaging design options are most appropriate for their recycled office paper line. Affinnova broke down the different elements of package design and, in a very cool experiment, tested those 22,000 potential combinations before 750 panelists over the course of a week. The resulting patterns in preference for design, font, color, etc. led Staples to redesign their packaging. While no results are given, it's presumably a success.
The only catch? Staples presumably has a huge market research budget and the luxury of taking the time to hire the consulting firm, set up the study, run it for a week, and analyze the results. So even if your organization wants to be data driven, unless you have the dollars and the time to do this, companies may be wondering if their only choice is to turn to your internal Don Draper to make a best guess at what the customer wants.
Rather than resort to Don, I would suggest that you can turn to your internal business intelligence solution to analyze the data that you already have to get an answer more affordably, and faster. It might not be as cool an answer as Affinnova can provide, but you can examine how historical package changes have impacted sales, analyze current buying trends, and come up with a more rational triangulation. Ifyou're using an on-demand business intelligence solution, achieving this should take limited amounts of time and funds, and leaves you with an ongoing analysis that gives you more insight over time, rather than a consulting report that reflects just a moment in time.
If you're curious about McAfee, check out his blog. He provides refreshingly rigorous, thoughtful, and lengthy blog postings about technology and business. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School, and a visiting Associate Professor at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management.
