Thirty three (ii)

“And use a PC rather than a Mac.”

Rachel frowned.

“Because Mac owners are perceived to be wealthier than PC owners, so supposedly less price sensitive.”

“No way!”

I’d got that factoid from The Economist.

As I got a coffee refill my mind turned to the marketers’ algorithms and performance metrics. There was no doubt that someone running this particular ad campaign and subsequent (selective?) promotion was running the numbers through some kind of real-time ROI analysis, and the conversation with Dom about SiQi TVs popped back into my mind.

“Were you intent on this particular brand?” I asked, tapping the watch in question. For the life of me I’d never heard of it.

“Oh yes. Sarah and Joanne have one already. They’re so cool. And they do great colors. And they buy musical instruments for schools. Sarah’s cousin gets to play drums during her lunch break.”

I wondered if the analysis in question took any of that in to account. If the metrics don’t, and if people perform as they are measured, the brand owners risk doing more of what they can measure and less of what they can’t or don’t measure, which might well lead to less effective investment of the budgets available; a symptom of ignoring complexity. Sarah calls it corrupt ROI – corrupt because it is simply erroneous, and corrupt because sometimes it’s a dishonest representation. For the moment, I just had this picture of a ‘digital type’ claiming the ROI entirely as his own.