My favorite gurus are talking about data this week.
In a great post today, Seth Godin discusses his five elements of marketing (and only one of them starts with a "P"). He begins with data and makes the following statement:
"Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what."
On Monday, Chris Anderson published a wonderful piece in Wired, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete".
Anderson is making a bold claim, that the scientific method – "hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete":
"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."
And later in the article:
"There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show."
It’s as if he’s talking about HiveSight!
Take the current model of market research, modeled on the scientific method – come up with a theory of your product and its place in the market and in consumer minds, formulate the questions to test that, build the panel or focus group, then finally test your hypotheses.
Now contrast that with the HiveSight model of consumer exploration – query for your brand, your competitors’ brands or your product category, and discover who your consumers are and what else they like. No need to hypothesize – let the data speak for itself (we are there to help you listen).
Go ahead, try some of our examples, then build your own and start exploring. What will you discover today?
