I’m old enough to remember when information about the market was rare, precious and expensive. It’s funny to recall that, in my first marketing role, almost everything we knew about the market was captured on two pages.

Today, by contrast, the marketers I study complain of being swamped by data and confused by information overload. And when I sit through their strategy presentations, I see the consequences of this embarrassment of riches. Lots of dense slides with complex charts, which I can tell took many hours of expensive time to create. Yet this elaborate slicing and dicing of the data rarely contains any novel insight. Its practical value, its usefulness less the cost of production and consumption, is usually pretty low. But I say ‘rarely’, rather than ‘never’, because a small minority of exemplary brand teams do manage to find insightful needles in their data haystacks. And they do that by unwittingly following a dictum of Charles Darwin. Spare me a couple of minutes and I’ll let you into their secret.

In 1861, Darwin wrote to his friend Henry Fawcett about recent progress in geological sciences: ‘How odd it is that everyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service.’ This sentence tells us much about how Darwin’s mind worked. Although he often wrote as if he began with observations and allowed explanations to emerge, an inductive process in scientific parlance, this wasn’t a true reflection of what went on inside his great mind. Rather, he approached all natural phenomena with a tentative explanation in mind and then used empirical observations to test that working theory; a deductive rather than inductive process. Indeed, he spent 20 years between his voyage on HMS Beagle and his publication of Origin of Species testing natural selection as an explanation of speciation. Similarly, most scientists today will tell you that, while keeping an open mind, almost all their experiments and observations happen in the context of a pre-existing working theory.

The pervasiveness of the deductive approach in science makes it all the more remarkable that it is so uncommon among the marketing teams of science-based companies. Brand teams will often present analyses that describe the market in exquisite detail but without any substantial explanation of what they describe. Even when faced with issues that demand explanations, they keep their minds too open. The market is growing at a slower rate? Market share distribution doesn’t correlate to value? Uptake is fastest among those we expected to be the laggards? Problematic observations like these are often revealed in one or more of teams’ countless slides, but robust explanations are much less in evidence. And when potential explanations are posited, they are often little more than guesses, assumptions or, worst of all, attributed to ‘common sense’. The sort of explanatory theories with paired, testable hypotheses that are routinely used by their scientific colleagues are rarely applied by marketers to their market data.

Brand plans rich in description but short on explanation are symptoms of marketers failing to distil insight from the oceans of information in which they swim. As Darwin’s Dictum tells us, insight usually comes from applying tentative working theories to what we see. This is neither as abstract nor as difficult as it might sound. When I help companies do it, I use the Alvesson and Sandberg’s problematisation approach. First we describe what we see, such as the distribution of customer preferences in a market. Then we compare different cases. For example, customer segments’ brand preferences. When those comparisons suggest explanations, such as price, performance or market inertia, those are then tested against market data. Finally data-supported explanations lead to recommendations for practical action. This problematisation approach is well validated in the published literature and by real-world practice.

So the solution to insight-free market analysis isn’t more slicing and dicing. It’s to have the courage to take a view about what you see. Look at unexplained variations within the market. Then take a view about the causes of those variations, even if it’s very tentative. Then ask how well your view stands up against everything else you see in your market data. Deductive approaches like this move your knowledge forward. That’s how Darwin did it. That’s how the most insightful brand teams do it. And that’s how your brand teams should do it.