Can good marketing make up for bad science?
| 23 March, 2011 | Morgan Giddings |
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I recently talked to a fellow scientist about grants, and he commented that he’d seen push-back over the notion that you must market your work to get funding.
Many people seem to confuse marketing with hyped-up used-car ads or get rich quick schemes. Yes, marketing is sometimes used for those purposes – but it is also used for many other more worthwhile things.
To illustrate: what has made Apple Inc. so successful for the past five years? Is it the products, or is it the marketing of the products?
Would Apple be the same success without either of those components? No.
If Apple created the iPhone, but failed to market it, it would have flopped.
If Apple had built a boring “me too” phone like everyone else, but did lots of fancy marketing, it would have likely garnered a yawn.
In fact, the product and its marketing cannot be separated, if you want success in the marketplace. They are integral. The product is designed to bring unique value to the marketplace, and the marketing then amounts to effectively educating the consumer about the value of the product.
Did you notice what I just claimed? Marketing = education.
If you were ever weirded out by the use of marketing and science in the same sentence, we can translate “marketing your science” to a nearly equivalent, but perhaps more palatable, expression: “educating your audience about the value of your science.”
Now, here’s the crux: if your science has no value to the “market” (your peers and funders) how are you going to educate them about its value? You can’t. You may attempt all the slick marketing in the world, but unless you’re making stuff up that’s not true (and earning yourself a trip to living hell), marketing cannot for very long cover for lack of a great “product.”
That’s why Marketing has a bad rap. It comes from the folks who have nothing of true value to offer, and who try to cover up the lack of value with slick salesmanship. Some such people may achieve some short-term success by this approach, but rarely does it last for long. Yet these folks are often the most visible, and hence the general notion of “marketing” becomes confused with this one type of obnoxious marketing.
I didn’t help clear up this confusion in some of my past blog posts. For a long time, I had an inbuilt and false assumption: that everyone in my audience already knew how to produce “great science,” and so they only needed help on the “marketing of the great science”. But it turns out that identifying and doing great science is quite often a challenge, and that until one does a good job at that, no amount of effective marketing will make any difference.
I’ve since realized a critical distinction: most scientists I know understand how to do science effectively, but that is distinct from doing great science.
Great science usually involves asking some really good questions, solving some really important problems, and coming up with some really innovative new approaches. To be considered great, those things have to be exiting not just to you, but to your peers and funders.
Only once you have your core, high-value scientific product worked out, is it time to think about how you will market it – but not before.
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If you’d like some personal insight on how to implement this to help your own career, you can sign up for a complimentary grant strategy session here (https://grantfoundry.com/GrantStrategypt1.html)
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Apple products may or may not be better than anyone else’s, but the marketplace certainly abounds with “premium” products whose perceived value is based solely on marketing. Bottled water. Branded drugs when generics are available. Homeopathy. Consumers are “educated” about these products through marketing, yes, but the education is false.
In science, I routinely see people whose primary skill is marketing ho-hum results. Usually the license to do this is based on past success. They have attained an aura of significance in their field that has become detached from what they are actually producing (hello again, Apple).
Excellent comment, Miko!
I have an example of very good publicity for a research topic that attracted mountains of funds: biodiversity. In spite of all these funds, the basic science of biodiversity exploration, namely taxonomy, is in great distress. The big projects on biodiversity praise the number of new species that were described, and these descriptions were made by taxonomists. But taxonomy took a ridiculous share of all these funds. If the funds would have gone to taxonomists, to do the work that they did anyway, taxonomy would be very healthy. Taxonomists work for free. Would you hire somebody who works for free to justify the funding of big projects run by somebody else? You hire the somebody else!
If you are interested in the intricacies of this story, check this out:
http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/1/115/
this little article has been downloaded 4.254 times, so far. And I received dozens of messages from taxonomists who testified that they went exactly through what I describe!
If you want even more go here:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000531
and, after having read the paper, have a look at the comment to it.
So, one might have a good product, and also good publicity, but sometimes even this is not enough.
I often refer to a very expensive project, that lasts since decades, costed billions and billions of dollars and never yielded a single positive result: the search for extraterrestrial life! The publicity is very good, though.
The secret is this: if you are very heavily funded, funding agencies are reluctant to cut the funds, since this would mean that they made a mistake!
In many cases, the important thing is not WHAT you know but WHO you know.
The first modern device to extract energy from the sun was developed by an Italian engineer named Giovanni Francia, in 1968 (I saw it when I was a teen ager):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
but you do not have to buy sun rays to produce electricity, so the idea was turned down: better use coal, or uranium, or oil, or dams. Those who sell this stuff are very powerful, and if your bright idea is against their interests, it will end up nowhere.
Think of the publicity: energy for nothing. And what is brighter than the sun? We went for nuclear power, instead! By the way, the guy who built the first nuclear power device was again an Italian: Enrico Fermi. And the guy who discovered electricity was Italian: Luigi Galvani. And the first who produced electricity, inventing the pile, was Italian: Alessandro Volta. And telecommunication is an Italian affair: the wireless telegraph with Guglielmo Marconi, and the telephone with Antonio Meucci. Ironically, Italy is not prominent in any of these fields. So, besides having bright ideas, you also need a good backing (and good lawyers).
To: Nando Boero
While I agree with the basic premise that in today’s world science is valued based on its application, which needs promotion by its nature, I just wanted to make a correction about Marconi’s ‘discovery’ of wireless communication. This was in fact done by Sir J. C. Bose in 1899, and Marconi may have in fact benefited from his promotion. This news is about a dozen year old now (see below). It is mentioend in some reports when Sir J. C. Bose was told about his infraction, he didn’t care much about the name and the credit. Catering to ego by funding, position, and awards may in fact be a bigger culprit in undermining science!
Science 23 January 1998:
Vol. 279 no. 5350 p. 476
DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5350.476
News & Comment
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Bose Credited With Key Role in Marconi’s Radio Breakthrough
Jeffrey Mervis and Pallava Bagla
+ Author Affiliations
Pallava Bagla is based in New Delhi.
DELHI, INDIA—The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi holds a secure place in the history books for decoding the first wireless message sent across the Atlantic Ocean. That achievement, on 12 December 1901, ushered in the modern era of electronic communications. But it also triggered a century-long debate over who should get the credit for developing the receiving device that captured the famous message, sent from England to Newfoundland via Morse code.
This month, an article in a special issue of The Proceedings of the IEEE, marking the 100th anniversary of the diode and the 50th anniversary of the transistor,* makes a definitive case for Jagadis Chandra Bose, an Indian biologist and physicist. Bose announced the invention in an 1899 paper presented at the Royal Society in London, writes Probir Bondyopadhyay, a satellite and communications engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston and also an amateur historian. In contrast, says Bondyopadhyay, Marconi “was like a honeybee collecting honey from different flowers” to improve his wireless transmitter. “And he never gave credit to those who deserved it.”
The device, called a self-recovering coherer, contained a sequence of iron-mercury-iron in a vacuum tube that was able to receive a long-distance message by continually resetting itself before each pulse. Bondyopadhyay says Marconi may have deliberately tried to divert attention from Bose’s contribution by leaving the impression that it came from others, including an Italian naval officer.
There is a risk of missing the fundamental message, which is simple:
* Good communications cannot save bad science.
* Good science often fails to have an impact because it is poorly communicated.
Further, the focus should be on communicatons, rather than marketing. They are not the same thing. All marketing may be communications, but not all communications is marketing. It is the obligation of scientists to contribute to the communication of the benefits or knowledge derived from their work. Whether the communication is also marketing depends on a lot of factors. As the author has suggested, If it is accurate and its great science, then it doesn’t matter.
Giddings’ writing stimulates. A challenge I see is that science topics often get marketed heavily and create unrealizable expectations. After a time, the rose fades.
Proteomics and biomarkers are typical of this. The work is much harder and will take much longer by decades, but the public was sold on a much faster result.
Science often involves the unknown unknowns. That adds to the excitement and scares accountants, strategic planners and congress persons.
All scientific discoveries and work should be promoted. Otherwise our society becomes even more obsessed with false celebrities from the consumerist culture.
And regarding funding, there is a great tool I found last week – http://www.agingportfolio.org. They actually track all biotech funding, not just aging. And some of the main grant recipients are people you have not even heard of in press.
And of course, it is obnoxious, when PR is made for ultra expensive (millions of dollars) multi-year projects like “The Effect of Barbers on Blood Pressure of Black Men” – http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/march2011/03142011barbers.htm
Not kidding… What about white men or black women? And the NIH is making press around that story!
Thanks for the correction, dear Bal Ram Sigh, now one should start a case, as it happened with Antonio Meucci and Graham Bell for the telephone. Just recently a US court recognized that the telephone was invented by Meucci and not by Bell. So, maybe, the credit goes to Bose. Sometimes the ideas are in the air… and there are double “discoveries”, as it happened for Darwin and Wallace, Lotka and Volterra, etc. Or, sometimes, one makes the discovery but nobody cares. Erik the Red “discovered” the American continent much earlier than Columbus, but his discovery had no impact, whereas Columbus started a novel Era. Together with Gutenberg, or were the Chinese to have invented how to print?