Tag Archives: Data collection

Call First

Do your friends just show up at your house around supper time?  Do any of them knock on your door unannounced as the game is starting so they can watch on your big screen TV and drink your beer?  I suspect most of them don’t.  It’s common courtesy to call first, isn’t it?  Even those folks who might have a standing invitation of sorts will generally do so, if for no other reason than to see if you’re home. 

I find it interesting, therefore, that many marketers don’t think about the same common courtesy.  That thought came to mind as I read the latest State Of Content report from the Adobe folks.  You can read the whole thing here (pdf), and there is a lot to digest.

Consumers understand the benefit of content recommendations, as long as those recommendations respect privacy. In the US, 73% believe they are meant to enhance the viewing experience. At the same time, 62% believe they don’t respect privacy.  In other words, sure, you’re a friend but you’re also showing up without calling.  Most Americans who use digital media (82%) are comfortable with sharing at least one piece of information about themselves in order to improve the recommendations they see. In other words, CONSUMERS ARE WILLING TO SHARE INFORMATION, BUT EXPECT RETURN ON VALUE.

Calling first means making the consumer comfortable about data collection. Those who are uncomfortable with predictive recommendations believe companies can do something about it, and the biggest thing companies could do is to ask permission to collect their data.  That’s why 63% trust content from a friend or family member and only 23% feel the same about content from a company whose products they don’t buy.

So how about it?  Are you calling first, or are you just showing up?

 

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Filed under digital media

The Pony

You’ve probably heard the old joke about the kid and the pile of horse manure.  There are many variants, but the basic story is that a kid is digging through a huge pile of horse manure.  When he is asked why his response is “with this much manure, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”  It’s a story a use to help clients understand the nature of data.  Any of us who are in business see more and more of it each day.  In fact, we’re probably setting up systems to provide more of it to us as well.  The unfortunate truth is that most of it is…well…manure.

a Shetland Pony. Français : Un poné (Shetland).

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’re after the pony, or at least we should be.  The pony is the actionable insights that are contained within the data and not the accumulation of data itself,  It does take a lot of digging, and that digging can begin only after we set up systems to gather and to organize the flood of data.  Knowing that website traffic grew as measured by session count tells you very little.  Understanding how it grew or if that growth was because a bunch of referrer spammers hit it gives you actionable information (update the spam filters!). Knowing that your store sales were up 5% without understanding that you’ve lost market share can cause you to think that you’re doing well when in fact you’re losing ground.

Say “so what” to yourself a lot.  If you can’t explain why a piece of data is meaningful, you need to discard it because it’s the manure surrounding the pony inside.  If you can’t put something into a broader context, push to do so. If you can’t determine a course of action based on a particular nugget of information, ignore it and keep digging until you get to the pony.  Make sense?

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Filed under Consulting

Why Your Marketing Job Is Safe

A lot of folks who thought they were in marketing are finding out that they’re really computer scientists. That’s a shame in my book. Surprised I’d say that after all of the rants in this space about the need to measure actionable data? Let me explain what I mean and how I think there will always be a place for real marketers.

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Computers and the data they can generate are really good at many things. I, for one, am very much looking forward to the day when they are driving all of our cars. One thing at which computers suck is creativity. They provide great creative tools like Photoshop, but the ability to create is intrinsically human, in my book. They aren’t great at improvising. They can’t “pretend.” I’ve not heard of them mashing up a couple of concepts into a third. Yet those tasks are the essence of great marketing.

We are complex creatures. There are things within the human mind and character that no computer can understand. They might get the “what” (actions you took) but most of us in marketing are interested in the “why” at least as much. It’s great that, as recent research found, 92.3% of respondents said they maintain databases to host information on customers or prospects, at least to some extent. I wonder if that data dependency is replacing the human side of marketing.

I like this quote from a recent article by someone at Adobe:

Buyers’ behavior isn’t always rational. People make strange decisions that defy neat algorithmic understanding. Often, customers are not simply looking for the highest-quality product for the lowest possible price. Indeed, the burgeoning field of behavioral economics is revealing on an almost daily basis how irrational consumers can be—and how seemingly irrelevant factors can influence purchasing decisions. Savvy marketing adapts to these nuances.

Exactly.  Computers don’t do irrational. We do need to use data as a tool, but we can’t assume that our jobs are done because we’ve got a system that aggregates and reports.  We can’t dive so deeply into data that we drown in it.  Computers can’t do marketing well because they lack the skills that make great marketing: intuition, creativity, innovation, compassion, and imagination.  You might think your marketing job has morphed into that of a computer scientist, and if it has, you have a problem.  Great marketers know how to use those tools within the context of the human to human interactions that make business flow. Do you?

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Huh?