Before realizing why being insights-driven is important for companies of all sizes, we need to understand what an organization needs to have in order to become (and remain) insights-driven. Here’s what a panel of experienced managers and marketers think are the crucial elements.
Continuing on the previous discussion on the importance of being insights-driven, Wes Nichols, an experienced business leader, and investor, emphasizes that data may be seen as the new oil, but it’s the insights that are fueling your business like refined oil is fueling your car.
“If you think about the way gasoline is made, crude oil is pumped out of the ground and it goes to the refinery - in this case, the analytic methods and the data science - then the refined oil or the insights come out of that. In the oil business, the refined product can be gas, jet fuel, diesel, wax… a bunch of different things comes out of the refinery. And it’s the same for data - we have insights coming out of analytics that can fuel marketing allocation, trade funds, new product development, market development funds…” says Nichols.
“Adverity is in a very good position to help companies be that refinery that not only aggregates the data, but then actually helps drive insights that are incredibly valuable to make better decisions.”
Wes Nichols, partner at March Capital
Andy Lark, a globally awarded CMO and marketing consultant that has worked on digital transformations of many world’s leading enterprises, says that there’s a lot of individuals and companies that can help you do more with data.
“The thing I think that many marketers are challenged with is that marketing today has been heavily isolated as a communications discipline, not as a business discipline. And that's a real tragedy because marketing was always intended to be a true business discipline. So, I think marketing leaders need to renew the curiosity within their organizations for the business, for the customer, for the business model, for what the actual outcome of the business is. Not for what ad campaign or what creative should we do next,” says Lark.
“Marketing today has been heavily isolated as a communications discipline, not as a business discipline. And that's a real tragedy, because marketing was always intended to be a true business discipline.”
Andy Lark, Consultant
He also emphasizes the importance of continuous learning from academic research, not only popular culture. “Accountants can't be accountants without getting accredited every year. Doctors have to get training every year. But somehow marketers, we can go to school between the ages of 23 and 24 and just stop learning from that point forward. So, I think my point is renewing a deep-found belief in the profession of marketing and taking the right philosophical lens that will lead you to use insights to support that execution model.”
John Veichmanis, COO of carwow, underlines the importance of curiosity and continuous experimentation. “When I think about performance marketing, for example, if we're bidding on Google Ads or social media as a platform business, if we see our campaigns starting to deteriorate in terms of their performance, it might be because we've used the wrong ads, or the ads are not working quite as effectively as they should do, or we potentially linked to the wrong landing page. Or there could be a bigger problem deep down in the actual product experience or the availability of a particular product.”
“The biggest opportunity is to make marketing a business discipline again and use data as the connective tissue to make sure that everything you do is aligned.”
John Veichmanis, COO at Carwow
“It's those curious minds that start to make those connections within the business again, as they probably would have been written down 30 years ago. I think we're starting to build those connective diagnostics back together, and that's the opportunity,” concludes Veichmanis.
This blog post is a part of a series based on the recent expert panel discussion organized by Adverity. Watch the complete conversation with John, Andy and Wes here or download the report.
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