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Data and marketing.

I'm never going to say that data isn't useful.

It allows you to see what decisions people made in the past. Google's 2016 Food Trends report does this in an especially appealing way.

Data shows you what worked. What didn't. Demonstrate how investment was returned upon.

But: data is limited. And this goes back to the constraints which knowledge can impose.

Quite simply, relying on past data overly much removes scope for improvements. Never mind that there's so much data out there that analysing all of it seems pretty much Sisyphean. And how easy it is to interpret figures in a way to mostly support one's own hypotheses, delivering the desired results.

Most importantly, data can't engender change – it can't tell you how to give people things they didn't know they wanted.

And data can entrap. Because if something has always worked in the past, there's always the temptation to repeat it ad nauseum – the death of innovation.

Point is: don't cling to data. Understanding the the past in the vague hope that it will reveal the future only works to an extent. Both Churchill or Santayana talked about how we need to learn from the past to avoid repeating it. So learn from past data – and then move on to create something new.

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