Give up on the idea of a balanced right/left brained marketer!

Here is my view on why large organizations should stop spending too much time looking for the perfect marketer and focus on the enlightened marketer that knows their limits and appreciates them because it allows them to find meet or get to know their “better-half” in the work world.

Over the last 10 years web analytics has struggled w/ the concept of how to inform decision makers w/ the data they need to make judgment calls on projects and programs that are designed to drive specific business outcomes. Typically the web/business analyst "crunches-the-numbers" and then delivers a report that has a most likely outcome scenario built to prove or disprove a given idea.

More recently analysts have been charged, by good business, managers to deliver positive outcomes by providing a wide variety of options rather than single minded best “chance” solution. It is my belief that business managers are providing this direction because they are learning that they don’t always have the best ideas, and they are getting more comfortable w/ looking at things from another point of view, and thereby want insight not reports.

The mandate that analysts deliver insights not reporting means that the analyst must start considering options not delivered to them in the analytics brief or directly by their manager, and w/o being omniscient this means that the good analyst will begin building deep relationships w/ program managers, creatives, project leads, and CSRs on a regular basis, so as to get more perspective on how to view the massive data sets that they are required to collect, filter and qualify.

In the last year what I've seen start happening at least at the enterprise level is the abandoning of the idea of a balanced right brain/left brain in a single person and more of the concept of building a good marriage between the analyst and the marketer/creative/designer. I think this is the future of the enterprise and most forward thinking organizations.

Today, technology has made it is easier than ever to implement specialists in a collaborative workforce. I think we will begin to see more and more teams begin to deep relationship in the work place where analysts and creative sit next to each other and volley ideas back and forth or problem solve together where each party follows a commonly held ideation process, but is charged or even to approach the task in a uniquely different way.

While applying the word “renaissance” to the new filed of digital-social-collaborative marketing may get a few cheeky gins cast my way, remember the reason the "real" renaissance was able to happen in the first place was that technology started a trend toward the division of labor that allowed specialists to have the time to hone their craft and appreciate the life they have chosen for themselves, thereby freeing them from the task of being a one-man-band.

We need more specialist nows, not more generalists

- X