Mayur Gupta: Marketing needs ‘someone to orchestrate the symphony’ (MarTech Conference)

Is marketing more of an art or science?

That question lies at the heart of a long-running industry debate, and it served as the foundation for an opening keynote Wednesday at our MarTech conference in San Francisco featuring conference chairman Scott Brinker in conversation with Spotify VP of Growth & Marketing Mayur Gupta.

The two discussed a recent survey of hundreds of marketers in which 50 percent said marketing is an equal mix of art and science — although another 31 percent believe it’s more science than art. But what about outside of marketers? Are non-marketing executives starting to see marketing as more of a scientific discipline?

“This is absolutely happening,” Gupta said. “Marketing is no longer just about branding. Marketing is being held accountable to drive growth for the company.”

Still, Brinker cautioned that marketing isn’t only about science. He says that the marketing technologies the industry builds have to meet the needs of a human connection — that’s where the art comes in. “There’s a lot of art required even in the process of building a technology for the end user,” Brinker said.

Art & science collide with the customer

Gupta and Brinker positioned the customer as the place where the art and science of marketing come together. Consumer expectations get higher every day, Gupta said, referring to how the iPhone changed our expectations of what a phone should do and how voice-enabled devices are changing expectations more recently.

Gupta urged attendees to learn from Amazon and put the customer in the middle of its organization structure, not focus so much on separate marketing channels. He said companies need a “horizontal layer” that brings all marketing channels together with the customer at the center of everything.

“There’s so much happening in each channel — things like artificial intelligence and machine learning are really big now,” Gupta said. “But in the middle you need experience planners — I like to call them growth planners. These are the people who orchestrate the symphony, the person who knows what instrument needs to come up and which one needs to quiet down at each point during the customer journey.”

We’ll have more coverage from the MarTech conference today and in the coming days here on Martech Today.