The Two Cultures

Posted 2009.05.06

It’s probably the last thing we need in marketing today – it being criticized for embracing the very basics of math. But that’s exactly what Al Ries did in Adage yesterday. He made some sweeping statements about the state of marketing today, arguing that the marketing community seems to be drifting from “a right-brain approach to a left-brain approach” and that left brain marketers will run companies into the ground by focusing on the numbers. Calculating ROI, according to Ries, is a waste of time.

Judging by the responses to the article, the Art vs. Science debate is very much alive in marketing today. It is also as old as Ries’ thinking. In 1959 CP Snow did his legendary “Two Cultures” speech at the yearly Rede lecture in Cambridge. Snow was a novelist who had also studied physics at the famous Cavendish Laboratory alongside Ernest Rutherford. He had spent his life moving between the literary intelligentsia and the science community, two groups he found to be opposite poles and which he described as two vastly different cultures who speak different languages. He claims that the lack of mutual respect between the 2 groups creates a polarization which “is a sheer loss to us all. To us as a people and to our society”.

Although Ries acknowledges that mathematics can play a very small role in marketing, the overall tone of his article is polarizing : it’s either math or marketing. He fails to see that one of the most interesting areas in marketing today is where the worlds of math and creativity come together in a way that was not possible at the time Snow gave his speech :

“There seems then to be no place where the cultures meet. I am not going to waste time saying that this is a pity. It is much worse than that. Soon I shall come to some practical consequences. But at the heart of thought and creation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures of two galaxies, so far as that goes ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came.”

Next week Tuesday, Dan Burrier, Chief Creative Officer Ogilvy LA and I will be speaking about this topic at the nGenera conference in Toronto. I’ll probably post some of the materials here after that.

You can download CP Snow’s speech on The Two Cultures here.