In light of the new expectations around inclusivity, increasing privacy demands and an ever-changing technological landscape, marketers need to reconsider their ways of working and move beyond simply reviewing how they collect, process and use data. Marketers should reflect on the role data plays in their business strategy and its potential to compound daily progress into sustainable success. They should ask themselves, “How can we use data and technology to transform our brand?”
We believe instead of working within rigid frameworks, brands need to develop clear working principles to make the most of the data available to them. Here is a good three-part preliminary data strategy.
Be data-informed, not data-driven
Organisations should move away from the chimera of pure data-driven decisions, where supposedly perfect data meet supposedly perfect algorithms. Investments in data should be made with the clear objective to only inform decision making, enabling us – not machines – to better assess opportunities and risks, and imagine more valuable consumer experiences.
Marketers also need to learn to do better with less or different data. For instance, we are observing a renewal of interest in search data as a key source of insights. Search data can be used as a proxy for market share, to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising, or to predict demand levels. All of this is available through relatively simple modelling that does not require massive data science capabilities or large first-party datasets – a characteristic particularly important in turbulent times.
Focus on high-value tasks
- Technology plays a critical role in helping us focus on higher value areas by removing repeatable tasks. According to the iProspect 2020 Global Client Survey, with increased improvements in marketing automation, marketers are keen to focus on becoming more analytical in decision-making (64% of respondents), improving the creative message (44%), building consumer empathy (42%) and understanding culture (25%). By using automation where it matters to give their marketing teams time to solve new challenges, organisations will be in a better position to improve every single consumer interaction - delivering value for all stakeholders, simplifying transactions, nurturing relationships, and building brand resilience.
Nurture an ever-learning mindset
Close to one marketer out of two (45%) declares the lack of agility to quickly evolve their proposition based on consumer response is a main challenge for long-term trust in their brand (iProspect 2020 Global Client Survey). This is why facilitating the circulation of data to continuously refresh the knowledge within the organisation is crucial, from consumer signals leading to new growth hypotheses, to activation allowing rapid trial and course-correcting, to new learnings feeding back into new hypotheses. This ever-learning mindset helps companies focus on what matters and close the gap between planning and execution one step at a time.
This article is excerpted from the report Future Focus 2021: Brands Accelerated.
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