Lessons Learned From the Middle School Science Fair

Jared Johnson, manager of marketing technology and analytics at Phoenix Children’s Hospital

“When a child wins the 6^th-grade science fair, no one tells her, ‘Congrats! You’re going to make a great marketer one day!’ But maybe we should,” says Jared Johnson, a #DigitalHealth Top 100 Influencer and Phoenix Children’s manager of marketing technology and analytics.

“The days of science and liberal arts being at opposite ends of the career spectrum are fading away, replaced with a call for curious minds willing to continually experiment in every aspect of marketing and communications.

“Thinking back to those middle school science competitions can help us understand how to succeed as marketers,” Johnson says.

He urges healthcare marketers to consider the parallels between the scientific method and effective healthcare marketing:

“The phases of the scientific method may not be as fresh in your mind as they were when you were glue-sticking printouts to a poster board, so here’s a refresher.

1. First comes the objective, the item of focus in your experiment. It is the effect of a variable on something else and includes a control group, or baseline.
2. Second is your hypothesis. You make an educated guess about the results.
3. Third is the procedure, documenting the steps you took to conduct your experiment so you can replicate it if you or anyone else wants to try it again.
4. Fourth is your observation of what happens while you conduct the experiment.
5. Next is analysis. You review your results and compare to your control group. You typically parse your data into charts, graphs, and tables to visualize it in different ways.
6. Finally, you reach a conclusion about whether your hypothesis was right and identify implications for related experiments.

“Isn’t this what we should be doing in today’s marketing?” he asks.

In our new article, Johnson lays out the case for scientific thinking as a must-have for today’s marketers. Read it now to find out why you should put on your lab coats and start hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing, and refining:

What the Middle School Science Fair Can Teach Marketers

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President