9 Mantras for Data Driven Marketing

I had the opportunity to participate in a Harvard Business Review sponsored Data-Driven Marketing: How to Engage Your Customers conversation yesterday featuring Thomas C. Redman, President of Navesink Consulting Group and author of the HBR article, "Data's Credibility Problem."

I left the session with the self proclaimed “the Data Doc,” with the following insights (supplemented with my own experience in the area):

1. Smart companies use data to drive competitive advantage. Mediocre ones just use it to drive operational efficiencies. Data may be the ultimate "proprietary technology" for companies who know how to use it right.
2. Data is a Marketing Weapon. It can drive competitive advantage by being used for "Informationalization" (building data into the product e.g. nutritional labeling on food products) and "Infomediation" (Can someone get between you and your customer e.g. Uber and the taxicab companies). Choose not to "Informationalize" or "Infomediate" at your own peril.
3. How to train your intuition/gut ? Intuition or gut feel is "soft data". Combine it with hard data. "Use your intuition to test the data
   and the data to train your intuition."
4. Experiment. Experiment. Experiment. You are only as good as your last experiment. Experiments help fill up holes in data.
5. Cast a wide net. Look at lots of data sources to create a picture. More pixels-->Better Screen Resolution; More Data sources --> Better Inferences and Decisions.
6. Data Quality is "YOUR" responsibility, not just IT's.
7. Big Data vs. Smart Data: Use data and analytics smartly to identify "sameness" and "differences". You gain competitive advantage by the way you are different not the way you are same.
8. Make sure your top level metrics are reflective of data being used. It will be ironic if you measure acceleration but report speed only.
9. Data: Love it or hate It but never ignore it! Avoid like-minded groupthink or get caught in analysis paralysis.Also remember that even as you play with data about the customer, the customer also has access to data about you and your competitors.

How effective have you been in using data to drive marketing and competitive advantage? What are some of the lessons you learnt on the way? Would love to hear those stories. Join the conversation!

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 25: 2015 and Business Intelligence (BI) - What do the Gurus Say?

This time of the year I like to do some crystal ball gazing on what the year holds for the world of BI - the technologies and the players. As always I follow the Newtonian dictum "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants".

My Big 3 are :

1. "My Shirt Feels....and Speaks ": The first mash-ups of real time information, Big Data Analytics and Wearable electronics emerge. (Think - sales reps getting live prompts on likely prospects when they enter a mall).

2. "Ye specialized BI player, what have you done for me lately which my major IT vendor has not": BI capabilities will increasingly become core functionality of the offerings from major software vendors increasing the pressures on BI players to find new ways to stay relevant. I will not be surprised if by year-end more BI players end up being hyphenated taglines for some major software vendor (deja vu- IBM Cognos et al)

3. "Pay me or else stay away":Some capabilities for monetizing the digital exhaust created by individuals will emerge so that they can track and receive "royalties" for use of the same by corporations; and some of their privacy concerns can be mitigated ("pay me if you want to use my location data or online purchase history ").

Here's what the "Giants" have been saying about the world of BI in 2015:

Prakash Nanduri lays out the following Top 6 predictions in Forbes:

Prediction 1: The lines will blur between data scientists and data analysts

Prediction 2: Microsoft and Salesforce will take a dominant share of the cloud-based business intelligence

Prediction No. 3: Data preparation replaces Big Data as the hottest topic in BI

Prediction 4: Hadoop faces a make-or-break year in the larger enterprise market

Prediction No. 5: Marketing will be the primary driver of BI decisions

Prediction 6: Internet of Things Gets Real for B2B

The experts at techpro and Tableau came up with these 10:

1. Self-service analytics spawns new data governance practices

2. Marketers and sellers turn social intelligence into smarter strategies

3. Analytic competencies emerge across the organization

4. Software user communities will be differentiators

5. Analytics solutions must integrate with other tools in order to become the standard

6. Cloud analytics isn't just for cloud data anymore

7. Conversations with data replace static dashboards

8. Data and journalism complete their merge

9. Mobile analytics mature

10. Deeper analytics capabilities become accessible to non-experts