Guest Post: "Rube Goldberg's CSV" (OnlyInfluencers.com)
At some invisible horizon-line future moment, marketing systems and practices of today will look as quaint, convoluted, and fragile as the mechanical systems immortalized by Rube Goldberg do to us. Goldberg’s whimsical machines — and more than a few real-world machines — amuse because they expend so much design and effort for such trivial ends. In our moment, though, marketers are so overwhelmed by systems and data that it’s difficult to remember what the marketing job-to-be-done is.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” —Peter Drucker
Hype around data is rampant. “It’s data that makes the largest technology companies so valuable.” “Data i’s the new oil!” While we’re past “big data” — Gartner dropped that phrase into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ over a decade ago — there’s still a pervasive notion that this nebulous stuff we call data is quite valuable.
OK — maybe it is, or can be. But the issue with data in the email space is that it sucks.