Guest · Measurement and effectiveness
Harry Davies
VP of marketing strategy, investment and effectiveness, Sage
A marketing scientist across public sector, Google, Amazon and now Sage, on effectiveness, brand for not-in-market buyers, and installing marketing with AI.
About
Harry Davies is VP of marketing strategy, investment and effectiveness at Sage, where he leads the company's evidence-based approach to measurement and the balance between brand and demand. A fine art graduate turned marketing scientist, he is known for treating marketing as a testable discipline and for translating econometrics and effectiveness into language sales and finance leaders will act on.
Davies came to marketing because there was little money in fine art, then got obsessed with it after a talk on direct mail testing. An early randomised experiment, two versions of a college recruitment letter with one offering a free bottle of water, showed him that almost anything could be measured, and he pursued a postgraduate in economics and mathematical science to understand it properly. He moved into central government, working on econometrics on problems as difficult as whether marketing could persuade long-term smokers to quit, and has stayed on the scientific side of marketing evaluation throughout.
From the public sector Davies went on to Google and Amazon, where a company policy of listening to customer calls shaped his belief that marketers must live with their customers. He now leads marketing strategy, investment and effectiveness at Sage, where he has pushed the company towards a balanced brand and demand model built around buyers who only come into market every five to eight years, reframed for internal audiences as building the pipeline of today and the pipeline of tomorrow. He is an advocate of the Ehrenberg-Bass school of distinctiveness and, increasingly, of applying marketing science through AI.
Career20 years
- 2021 to now Sage VP of marketing strategy, investment and effectiveness
- 2019 to now International Journal of Marketing Research IJMR Advisory Board member
- 2019 to now Market Research Society (MRS) MRS Impact award Judge
- 2018 to now Market Research Society (MRS) Senior Client Council
Show earlier roles: Google, Amazon, COI, Central Office of Information (COI), Department for Work and Pensions
- 2020 to 2021 Google Head of Sales Data Science and Analytics - Google Cloud EMEA
- 2019 to 2020 Google Head of Measurement and Analytics
- 2018 to 2020 Google Head of Marketing Measurement and Attribution, UK
- 2016 to 2018 Google Head of Performance Ads Marketing, EMEA
- 2014 to 2016 Amazon Head of Amazon Marketing Services - Europe
- 2013 to 2014 Google Lead Product Marketing Manager EMEA, Large Customer Marketing
- 2012 to 2013 Google Head of Product and Solutions Strategy UK
- 2010 to 2012 Google Industry manager, Agency
- 2008 to 2010 COI Team head - digital marketing
- 2008 Central Office of Information (COI) Digital media manager
- 2006 to 2008 Department for Work and Pensions Ecommunications adviser
How Harry thinks3 convictions
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Test and learn over certainty
Davies does not chase the perfect academic answer, because practitioners have neither the time nor the risk tolerance for it. His whole approach, from stuffing 2,000 envelopes by hand to feeding brand tracking into econometrics, is to make each decision a little better than the last. He treats a test and learn culture as the single most important thing a marketing team can build.
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Live with your customers
Davies credits Amazon's rule of a week a year on customer calls with shaping how he works, and once enrolled in a stop smoking clinic without smoking just to understand what his campaigns asked of people. He argues good marketers read the science, then spend an inordinate amount of time with customers. Understanding what customers need and feeding it into the product is, in his view, the most undervalued skill in the field.
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Read the marketing science
Davies is unusual in B2B for grounding his practice in academic literature, from Ehrenberg-Bass on distinctiveness to journal work on how marketing actually operates. He believes B2B lacks the 20-year grad-programme muscle of consumer brands, which is why quality is often lower. His advice to newcomers, and his hope for AI, is that engines get built on solid marketing science rather than the latest LinkedIn trick.
