Demystifying Customer Science

By Aarron Spinley [Full article in Mumbrella, August 25, 2025]

Many people get confused by terms like ‘customer science’. They assume it to be some abstract and academic petri dish approach to a field that is full of nuance, culture, and context. Hardly the stuff of zeros and ones, or physics, they say. 

It wasn’t that long ago that Mark Ritson said: “We’ve been having a debate about whether marketing is science for about 50 years. And the recurring answer is ‘no’”.

Of course, the bedside manner of a doctor represents soft skills, and applied judgement. But the field of medicine is still a science. Conversely, the design of a house relies on physics and mathematics. But the building industry is not generally regarded as a field of science at all. Our application of the term is somewhat, fluid, shall we say. I should hasten to add that Ritson now happily endorses many aspects of marketing science.

What is scientific management? It’s nothing more than evidence-based decision making. 

It was back in the throes of the post-industrial revolution that a chap called Frederick Taylor gave us the principles of scientific management, both in his 1911 book of the same title, and in his work which is widely regarded as the foundation of Henry Ford’s efficiency triumphs on the production line. 

Many see his legacy as the breaking down of jobs into distinct tasks, timing them, and re-designing the process to be faster, and leaner. But they miss the point of Taylor’s work. He was much more broadly concerned with using proven established positions, tru datums, to inform practice, and decision making overall. 

Not a petri dish in sight.

Later, the same underlying principles would go on to provide the foundation of quality management systems, which emerged as post-world war two Japan sought to recover its economy. Still no petri dish.

So, what is customer science, then? It’s simply the evidence-based methods for managing a customer base, in the same way that its papa bear, marketing science, provides a body of evidence used in the pursuit of the wider market. 

In marketing’s case, this fits beautifully in and around and over and under the classical marketing sequence, borne of the sweat of industrialists, economists, and scholars, and given life at Harvard University in the 1950s. There are many aspects of course, from the Ehrenberg Bass concepts of market penetration via mental and physical availability, to the application of excess share of voice, and off into multi-media mix research, and so on. As the data grows, and as the evidence solidifies, piece by piece, practice is so informed. This is scientific management. 

In the exactly the same way, customer science is simply the ‘evidence-based management of the customer base’. Want to learn about it, and its application to your career, and in your business?

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