March 11, 2026
I have a love hate relationship with marketing science. There, I said it.
Blasphemous, I know. Particularly on LinkedIn. But maybe it needs a bit of poking to make it more useful.
Stick the word "science" in a sentence, and it automatically carries weight. Add a person of letters from a recognised institution, with a study to hand, and you'd better take it seriously.
And when ivory towers are created, the rules are aggressively defended.
That means when you question anything, you look like a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.
So, here I go.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve taken part in what people call the middle-aged Olympics.
If you haven't heard of it, it’s known as Hyrox. Eight 1km runs, followed by eight other things.
It’s a real lung buster, reaching cult like status - without advertising.
As a middle aged man doing his best to stop his body from falling apart, I've been nerding out on the science behind the sport. Unfortunately, my sports science career peaked in 1998 with a mediocre A-Level, so I studied marketing at uni instead.
But what's interesting is how different the culture of sports science is from marketing science.
Yeah, it has factions and people who defend their ivory towers as they do in our industry, but to be honest, it just feels way more sciencey.
Deep into my research, I found an analogy that nearly made me fall off my treadmill.
Is there an outside chance that "the laws" of marketing are nothing more than helpful but oversimplified generalisations? A bit like, if you want to reduce the risk of heart disease, be more active.
Here's a quick exercise. Stand up, put your arms out, and squat as low as you can. Simple enough, I hope.
But in that one movement, there are hundreds of variables affecting the force on your knee. So many that it's nearly impossible to measure them accurately.
In Alex Viada’s book, The Ultimate Hybrid Athlete, he recounts his time studying:
“On my first day at biomechanics class, the professor asked us to analyze the forces around a knee joint during a squat. Over the next three classes, we filled a board with our assumptions. Everybody contributed pieces of information for consideration, ranging from the flexing of external load to compression of cartilage, from tendon elasticity to the curved shape of the medial and lateral condyles, and more.
By the time we were done, we had close to a hundred different variables that contribute to the force curve, and we realized that the calculation of forces, even at a single moment in time, would require that we ignore dozens of small variables and dozens of still-relevant variables to have any hope of an accurate calculation. By the time we got around to creating a few equations to give us a force number for a single structure, we realized that our answer would be so inaccurate and imprecise that it was, in effect, a guesstimate.
It served as a cautionary tale. The reason the professor led with this exercise is simple: to get us to beware of attempts to generalize about exercise, forces, or movement based strictly on a mechanical analysis, no matter how thorough it may seem”.
So if sports scientists can't accurately model a squat, can marketing scientists really capture all the forces that drive brand growth in a single formula?
I'm not dismissing the value. It helps. But it makes you think.
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A marketing scientist and a sports scientist walk into a bar.
The sports scientist asks: ‘How does a brand grow?’ The marketing scientist says: ‘Follow my rules’.
The marketing scientist asks: ‘How do I run a sub-3:30 marathon?’ The sports scientist says: ‘It depends’.
A terrible joke. But the point stands.
Ask a sports scientist how to improve your performance, and the first thing you'll hear is "it depends", followed by a thorough interrogation: training history, age, lifestyle, past injuries, VO2 max, HRV trends. Then, and only then, will you get a tailored plan, probably with a long time horizon.
In sports science, performance is deeply individual. In marketing science, regardless of which doctrine you follow, brands apparently all grow the same way. There's very little nuance.
Sports scientists feel more credible because they're hands on. Most have been, or still are, serious athletes. They practice what they preach. Challenge them, and you don't just get a study from 2015, you get concrete examples from real experience.
They also coach, train and study everyone from people with chronic illness to Olympians. And they work collaboratively. A sports science department is filled with deep specialists looking at performance from every angle.
Marketing science, by contrast, often feels like a detached island that has descended into a LinkedIn cock off between academics arguing over who's right. Meanwhile, practitioners read a couple of books, screenshot some charts, and declare themselves experts overnight.
It's the equivalent of me trying to coach the Australian Olympic team after 100 hours of reading and listening to podcasts.
In summary, marketing science is genuinely valuable. It's full of smart people worth listening to. But I wouldn't follow their training plan blindly, and I'd certainly want a second opinion before the race.
The principles should absolutely form the foundations of what you do, but the specifics of your brand’s situation, constraints and capabilities need to be stacked on top. That’s where the performance increases exponentially.
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