The objectivity advantage: how stripping bias from decisions yields better creative, media, and comms.

CMOs must address the real challenges — cognitive biases and the need for a data-informed culture.

Joseph Enever, Senior Director Analyst of the Gartner Marketing practice, Gartner

A child is sick. Their parent places their hand on their forehead to check their temperature. It's a comfort to them, but it's guesswork for the parent. Warm room? Cold hands? Stressful day ahead? Instinct and context cloud the reading. The difference between a casual "you'll be fine" and a call to the doctor can hinge on a feeling.

Centuries ago, Galileo Galilei helped us move beyond gut instinct with the invention of the thermometer. The impact was that human uncertainty gave way to precision. Human bias and variable conditions no longer dictated the outcome; instead, objective evidence and data did. That step change and commitment to scientific inquiry enable parents today to make decisions that can be trusted.

What does this have to do with marketing and business?

Marketing misled by instinct.

The problem isn't that marketing is sick. It's that we don't always know when it's healthy, or when it isn't.

In boardrooms and campaign reviews, practitioners and leaders alike still reach for familiar instincts. They glance at dashboards, scan reports, and lean on old models. It feels like data-driven decision-making, but often it's just the modern equivalent of a hand to the forehead, like folk medicine dressed up as science.

Despite their best intentions, executives fall prey to cognitive and organizational biases that get in the way of good decision-making.

McKinsey
Bias Busters: When the question—not the answer—is the mistake

The issue isn't expertise. Experience matters. But context and bias always creep in. A sales team swears they "know the customer." An agency insists its creative will cut through. A practitioner clings to the metric they trust most. Each perspective has value, but none are neutral.

Meanwhile, the environment has shifted. Marketers are expected to deliver growth in saturated markets, build brands under constant scrutiny, and keep pace with customer expectations that evolve daily. And they're doing this in a data ecosystem that is fragmented, inconsistent, and overwhelming. Metrics don't align, platforms don't integrate, and practitioners over-index on whatever feels most familiar. It's like checking the temperature of the business's forehead but ignoring its blood pressure, pulse, or history.

Marketing can't afford to keep relying on folk remedies. Gut instinct, selective metrics, and legacy models are no longer enough. The future of marketing lies in moving beyond instinct and fragmentation toward clarity and truth. With the right tools, practitioners and leaders can finally see the whole picture. They can see customers as they really are, opportunities as they truly exist, and strategies guided by evidence rather than assumptions. Without an accurate objective and unifying thermometer, businesses risk making million-dollar decisions based on a hand to the forehead.

Challenges of subjectivity:

• Overreliance on intuition or past experience
• Bias — personal and contextual factors
• Lack of accountability
• Inconsistent results
• Decision paralysis
• Scalability problem

Objectivity: The introduction of tools

When Galileo pioneered the thermometer, it wasn't about sidelining human judgment. It was about amplifying it, providing people with a tool that stripped away bias and noise, so their decisions could be sharper, faster, and more decisive.

That's exactly how we see the role of technology in marketing. At the intersection of data, artificial intelligence, and human expertise lies a discipline we call customer science. It's the way to cut through the overwhelming complexity of modern marketing and replace it with clarity, simplicity, and impact.

Customer science is our systematic approach to transforming marketing from partial expertise into objective intelligence. We don't just collect data; instead, we curate the right data, drawn from multiple, sometimes even opposing, sources. We don't just apply AI; instead, we harness advanced models, including LLMs trained on diverse perspectives, and force them to reconcile, thereby stripping away bias. We fuse that with the instincts and creativity of marketers, elevating their expertise with evidence.

The paradox is the power: sophisticated technology that makes marketing more straightforward and more effective. A process that takes billions of signals and turns them into a single, reliable diagnosis. Customer science delivers the marketing equivalent of the thermometer: objective, repeatable, and trusted truth. Something only now made possible by the scale of today's data and the unlocking force of AI.

Why now?

Modern marketers are navigating chaotic times, where there is often too much data, too little time, and too much at stake. They can not rely on instinct alone when they're working at speed, scale and under colossal pressure. What we hear and understand from conversations with senior leaders is that the demand to remove risk from assumptions is real. Doing so will enable CMOs to work with strained budgets more effectively, with confidence, and empower smarter, more informed decision-making. Where once 'too much data' was a burden, customer science enables marketers to turn it to their advantage.

We used to talk about intuition as if it were enough. But today, even great intuition needs proof. You can't afford to 'feel' your way through strategy anymore. Customer science brings the evidence that turns good instincts into great decisions.

Alex Gronke, Content Director, Pretzl

Our customer science: What it is and what it isn't

Customer science isn't more dashboards. It isn't drowning in disconnected reports or piling on yet another analytics platform. And it definitely isn't instinct masquerading as insight.

Customer science is the systematic application of the right data, advanced AI, and human expertise to replace partial views with objective clarity.

• It's not just data. It's purposeful data curated, connected, and drawn from multiple, sometimes even conflicting, sources to eliminate blind spots.
• It's not just AI. It's AI built on diverse, large language models, designed to interrogate, reconcile, and refine, so bias is stripped away and patterns emerge that no single perspective could see.
• It's not just human instinct. It's human expertise elevated that's sharpened by evidence, empowered by technology, and freed from the noise of bias and incomplete information.

Customer science is the paradox that makes modern marketing work: using the most sophisticated technology available to simplify, clarify, and enhance the effectiveness of decision-making. It transforms overwhelming complexity into objective direction.

This is not a new tool on the stack. It's the marketing equivalent of the thermometer. A step change that replaces assumptions with truth, instinct with intelligence, and subjectivity with clarity.

How customer science drives objectivity

Our approach to customer science combines advanced technology, AI, and curated human expertise to map and optimize the customer journey like never before. Unlike generic tools, we draw on multiple, purpose-built inputs:

• Quantitative and qualitative audience signals that reveal real behavior, not theoretical assumptions.
• Trends, opportunities, and \"jobs to be done\" so brands can deploy content, channels, and communications that actually engage customers.
• Cross-platform performance data from social, CRM, and digital analytics, reconciled to create a unified, objective view of the customer.

This methodology synthesizes these inputs to create a complete, 360-degree view of friction points, opportunities, and customer behavior patterns. It enables us to test hypotheses in real time and predict the impact of marketing and sales actions across the journey, helping brands make decisions faster, more confidently, and with a measurable impact.

Technology and AI give us clarity, objectivity, and speed. They are the thermometer that measures temperature across billions of signals. This use of technology complements human insight, providing a reliable foundation for creativity and strategic decision-making. It transforms raw data into actionable intelligence, enabling precise, personalized, and truly journey-driven marketing.

The result? Brands can connect with customers in ways that feel natural, relevant, and immediate, while making every action measurable, evidence-based, and optimized for impact.

Measuring with confidence.

Have we reached a Galilean moment for marketing? Rather than mercury, is AI powering a new epoch of enlightenment in the discipline of marketing? Customer science takes the objectivity of a thermometer, but goes a lot further.

The result is marketers can make swift, objective decisions that withstand scrutiny, not just within marketing but across the entire business. No more approximations, assumptions, or internal bias.

The modern marketing leaders who will thrive are those who combine the empathy of the human hand with the precision of the machine. When the heat is on, they don't just sense something is wrong; they know exactly how hot it is and can act with certainty.