Helen Edwards: ‘Data doesn’t give you answers – it gives you more questions’
An endless loop of data and research is stopping marketers from finding creative answers to the challenges they face.
Marketers need to stop expecting data to give them the answers to the marketing challenges they face – and instead rely on their own creativity to find new paths to growth.
“Marketers love data because they believe it will help them make decisions and get better answers. But sometimes data lets you down,” Marketing Week columnist Helen Edwards told the audience at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing today (3 October). Edwards pointed out that marketers can fall into a “circle of doom” and commission “more research, more data” to try to find the perfect solution to their problem and, in doing so, forget the underlying truth of data: “It doesn’t give you answers. It gives you more questions.”
