MEASURING THE IMMEASURABLE
Communicate Magazine
“ Great idea but It won’t sell if it’s not measurable; we need to look at the ROI and make sure the risk is low for us to go for it.”
There’s nothing wrong with this sentence, except that it’s utterly wrong when it comes to coming up with new ideas.
Trying to measure ‘probable perception’ using number is highly unlikely, unless you’re a fortune teller, but sadly that’s what marketers want nowadays, they have people they need to report to and they need to justify spending a certain amount of money on a project that may seem completely oblivious to those who don’t know how to judge it.
I know that this does not apply to all marketers, there are “thankfully” still those who understand the importance of psychological impact on advertising and that know that spreadsheets can’t foresee something as complex mysterious as an idea that it meant to change perception.
Look at it this way, and this is the truth, most who work in creative know, the idea usually comes before the rational, it’s a gut feeling, it’s sometimes a risk, it’s not measurable, it exists because you know deep down inside that it is the right thing to do, and trying to put numbers behind it or promises, is most of the time impossible.
There’s a measure on how fast a car goes or how many passengers it carries, there’s no numerical measurement on how enjoyable the journey is, or how annoying it is to find a parking spot.
We tend to focus disproportionately on things that are numerically expressible, in physics you can measure density and pressure the stuff that matter in the physics experiments, but In the real world, in the world of economics and psychology though, you can’t measure the stuff that matter, these days it’s demanded of our ideas and theories to be formulated in such terms that they only refer to measurable magnitude.
And that’s where limitations come from, I hope we can start looking at things in a different perspective, the kind of perspective you don’t need ECXEL and pie charts to see.
