Dancing and Marketing Science

Last week I went to a dance performance of the “River North dance company” http://www.rivernorthchicago.com/ at the Harris Theatre in Chicago (Thank you Tracy!). It was a very amazing display of beautifully choreographed and well-executed dance pieces. Thinking about the artful beauty of this dance scene, I had to acknowledge my ignorance in understanding the very detailed choreography of what I saw. I knew that dance experts in the audience were able to dissect the different moves, and might have been able to recreate the thousands of moves to build a full dance script.

Suddenly it reminded me of the exact discipline of what we data and science oriented marketers are trying to achieve. We attempt to reverse engineer consumer behavior by understanding “Consumer performances” with any available data set that we can leverage. Our work is all about understanding and documenting the consumer script, meaning his behavior post, during, and after product purchase or service consumption. It is really reverse engineering of the full consumer behavior chain.

But real marketers are not just reverse engineers. We try to be more than just expert spectators of a dance performance who are not able to write their own dance piece. Real marketers become choreographers, too. We are really trying to create a living and breathing marketing program in which the consumer acts performances, hopefully as close as possible within the realm of choreographed behavior script.

This is the focal point of where successful marketing and art meets, it’s first about reverse engineering to then enable smarter engineering of a creative end product. That’s why great marketers are in the business of creating interactive art projects. Real marketers are more than just spectators; they are more than experts who can dissect and replicate existing performances. They are creating a new realm for exciting performances. Will we enjoy all marketing performances? It all depends on the quality of choreography.