Leveraging Data for Marketing Decisions

This article was originally published in Advertising Age India. bit.ly/datainmarketing. 

"Hey Sree, check out that funny video by AIB on YouTube" my colleague exclaimed from her desk that's located few cubicles away from mine. "Which video in particular are you talking about?" I inquired. "It's right on the home page of YouTube" she reassured, not realizing that no two people's YouTube screen and recommendations looks the same if they remain logged-in to their Google account. Try this little experiment yourself on Amazon or Facebook; see how two people's home page or news feeds starkly differs from one another.

The algorithm that does this may be complex, but the logic for doing this incredible simple. When you can know your customer well, why not hyper-customize everything to suite the individual's taste and preferences?

The keystone that makes all this possible is 'data', which is becoming an endgame for a few and an enigma for others. In simpler words, while ecommerce and tech enabled brands are leveraging data to make better decisions and pursue customers, conventional & brick-n-mortar business lack such granular information about their own customer. How can this situation be evened out?

Reimagining Customer Data

Who says traditional stores can't customize customer experience? How many times has a kiranawallaor your nearest pharmacist greeted you by name and started gathering a set of items your regularly shop there? Some of them maybe really intimate or private, but he knows that, respects your privacy and makes your life easy by adding it to your shopping basket discretely.

If you are thinking how can this be made possible at scale, say Shoppers Stop, then here's one way to do this. Why must I swipe my FirstCitizen card (their loyalty program) at the time of billing? Can I not swipe it as soon as I enter the store and be greeted by salesman, who'll quickly learn about my favourite brands & sizes based on past purchase and then recommend me what's new, what's on sale, et al? It is not just about data, it is about its application that matters.

Redefining the Measure of Advertising Success

John Wanamaker said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". Well, if he lived today, he may attribute only a fraction of his spends as non-measurable and surely not fifty percent. With tools like Conversion Tracking you can check what happens after a customer clicks on your ads for up to 30 days. With remarketing, reach people who visited your site even after 500 days. Running promotions and measuring redemption rate for coupons are much easier, thanks to sophisticated POS solutions. Geo-fenced and location based ads create urgency for eat-out places and cinemas. Print ads with hashtag now triggers a topic to trend on Twitter...the possibilities are plenty. If only we start to measure it more effectively.

Can We Get the CIO to Marry the CMO?

Figuratively, of course. Every organization that serves customers at scale are producing boatloads of data - enquiry, sales, fulfillment, after sales service so on...but the challenge for the chief information officer is to make meaningful insights by putting the data together that was garnered from each of the silo and then empower the CMO with customer insights, changing preferences, etc., who'll in turn create delight for customers. If this dream wedding happens, then we can expect hospitals to warn us about epidemic trends, telecom companies to recommend a better and cheaper tariff based on your usage, car companies will call you just in time if your battery or tyre is due to be changed. If any of these are counter intuitive from a sales perspective, this month, Amazon's market value crossed Wal-Mart despite the later having higher sales revenue. Aim to delight a customer, see the magic!

Serving Unmet Needs

Not looking at data outside of one's own business leads to myopia. Consider this, New York City had 13,500 taxis, along came Uber and added 14,000 'more' cabs on street. What took so long for someone (read as Hertz, Enterprise) to forecast this latent demand? The examples of businesses being myopic are plenty, post office did not invent the email, Microsoft waited too long to make it big on mobile. In Indian context, a lot of eCommerce brand's success can be attributed to their fulfillment mechanism that stretches even to hinterlands; who has stopped any existing retailer from doing this?

All said, decision based only on data could lead to paralysis by analysis; however we must never forget what Mark Twain said - "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

The article is written by Sreeraman Thiagarajan (@sree_raman), who is Vice President at Publicis Beehive. Views expressed here are his own and not that of his agency / employer.

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• The Art of Client Servicing. Is it Science? (Ad Age)