Brand and Marketing Field Guide: Practice

Do you use experiments and metrics to actively grow and improve your business?

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Practice Definitions & Examples

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Experiment

This is the overall process of testing ideas and assumptions within your business and learning from the results. It’s roughly based on the traditional scientific method, where you create a hypothesis, test it, gather results, and extract learnings.

Read our article on Business Experiments:

Why You Need to Run Experiments On Your Business

Access our Business Experiment Template:

Experiment Template (Google Doc)

Hypothesis

In essence, it’s a prediction about some aspect of your business. It’s a statement about a specific idea that you can test in some measurable way. It’s seeking to establish a causal relationship: i.e. “If I do (this), then (this) will happen.”

Metrics

What you’ll use to measure the results of the experiment to determine if it’s a success or a failure. Could be quantitative (numerical) or qualitative (descriptive), but needs to be measurable in some way.

Timebox

A predetermined time for how long the experiment will run. This is important so that you can cut off data gathering at some point and evaluate results.

Validated Learning

What you take away from the results of the experiment. This information is used to inform any changes you’ll make to your strategy and business. It will also help determine whether future experiments should be conducted around similar ideas.