Submitted by Matt Valle, MRX Innovation & Strategy Leader & Founder @ Rock n’ Roll Research Podcast

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Many people in the insights industry know that music is my jam, and that punk rock is what moves me the most. But my first love was baseball; more specifically, baseball statistics.  

Baseball has a 100+ year continuous record of historical performance. I spent thousands of hours as a kid elbow-deep in the Baseball Encyclopedia*, exploring data relationships and making comparisons of the best players, seasons and teams that the rich history of major league baseball has to reveal. 

[Aside: I once undertook a project to find any and all players in history with palindromic names. For what it’s worth, the most palindromic name in baseball history is a utility player from the 1970s named Otto Velez.] 

In college, I discovered a security guard-turned-author named Bill James, who wrote an annual statistical baseball compendium called, “The Baseball Abstract.” He used available data to resolve age-old questions like, “when, if ever, is the sacrifice bunt a good strategy?” or “what sorts of players deliver more value than conventional wisdom might suggest?” 

I learned that an upstart data company called STATS, Inc. (now Stats Perform and owned by Vista Equity Partners) was supplying much of the data that fueled Bill James’ analysis known as ‘sabermetrics.’ 

As a statistics undergrad, I was so taken by this approach that I wrote the company and became a part-time field reporter, helping collect obscure statistics to support their expansion into the NFL and the NBA. 

Why are teams using the same old strategies when the data say they should do otherwise? I was dumbfounded by this. 

Ask ChatGPT what defines the ethos of punk rock and the first answer is “distrust of authority.” Bill James may not have looked punk rock but he was the embodiment of it. 

Fast forward, and I found my way into the field of market research. While working for what is now Thomson-Reuters in the late 1990s, I read an article by Andrew Ehrenberg about the folly of couponing as a strategy for sustainably attracting new customers. 

The article was only tangentially relevant to my work at best, but: 1) I was a sponge to learn everything I could as a young researcher, 2) his use of data to support his argument was forceful and convincing, and 3) his conviction and enthusiasm for confronting the tenets of marketing theory was truly inspiring. 

Distrust of authority. Willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. From a 70+ year old professor, no less. 

(Side note: I was so taken by the article that I wrote Professor Ehrenberg. He added a stop in St. Paul to his forthcoming trip to the US to meet with me and talk more about it in person. That meeting is a treasured moment in my career in market research.) 

Back to baseball, teams eventually caught on and the revolution in sports analysis has now been well-documented in Michael Lewis’ book “Moneyball,” later adapted to a movie by the same name starring Brad Pitt. It was wildly popular and you’ve probably seen it. 

Similarly, the research of Andrew Ehrenberg (prolific, far beyond the article I referenced) has continued and grown through the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Sciences at the University of South Australia and, of course, has been codified in the groundbreaking, “How Brands Grow” (HBG) by Byron Sharp and its subsequent expansions. 

I have not personally met Byron Sharp, but I did help organize an American Marketing Association (AMA) Event years ago for which he was a keynote speaker. Professor Sharp presented his ideas to classic marketers and it was near mutiny. He channeled Christopher Hitchens and Johnny Lydon while challenging concepts like brand segmentation and loyalty and dispatching audience objections with gleeful confidence.  And he had the data to back it up. I haven’t seen such lively conference debate since. Not even close. 

A few things Moneyball and HBG share in common: 

• Baseball wisdom was previously dominated by scouts and marketing wisdom was similarly dominated by gurus. In each case, best practices were defined by theory, example and the first-hand experiences of experts 

• Both baseball and marketing were data-rich environments where the data were used situationally (within) but not holistically (across) 

• The conclusions challenged long-held beliefs and were met with fierce resistance 

• As acceptance increased, ever more data became available, much of it leading to often spurious, misleading conclusions  

• Neither is a completely closed system or is absent contradiction (Bertrand Russell tried this with mathematics. It’s not possible. See Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems) 

• Wider scale adoption has led to fresh new opportunities to differentiate 

On that last point, the life cycle from outrage to interest to openness to acceptance has been much faster for baseball than for marketing. Measurement is simpler, the experiments are cleaner and the conclusions are more obvious.  

Today, every baseball team now has an analytics department. The definition of an “undervalued player” has become commodified. Many teams are now looking to scouts once again to surface qualitative differences in players that could provide a competitive advantage. 

Marketing is a far more complex game, has many more “players” and, while the data revolution started sooner, the life cycle has progressed much more slowly. Brands in categories with near universal saturation are looking beyond HBG for new growth strategies. And while many big companies have adopted HBG principles, the debate still rages on, especially as media and retail opportunities continue to fragment and proliferate. 

And debate is sorely welcomed. It is a critical accelerant for progress and the industries comprising marketing, insights and data could surely use more. The success of your brand depends on it. 

Moneyball and How Brands Grow have revolutionized their respective fields. Each are frameworks that emerged in relatively mature disciplines by people who asked questions and had the conviction to let the data illuminate a path closer to truth.  

As these concepts approach the level of conventional wisdom, they invite the next wave of pioneers who disrupt the status quo and make forward progress. It’s happening already. In the immortal words of the Exploited, Punk’s not dead, I know it’s not! 

*The historical record has been rightly expanded to include the statistics, stories, and achievements of the pioneering participants of the Negro Leagues and Women’s Leagues, which are best chronicled in the books, “Only the Ball was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams” by Robert W. Peterson and “A Whole New Ballgame: The Story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League,” by Sue Macy, later popularized by the movie, “A League of Their Own.” 

Bill James	Andrew Ehrenberg