The Math, the Magic and the Customer [REPORT]

By Laura Beaudin, Mark Brinda and Jason Ding
 
Forget Mad Men. Today’s marketers are more likely to be math men and women. They plumb the depths of Big Data with advanced analytical tools. They buy and use dazzling new software—some spend more on technology in a given year than their companies’ IT departments. They are hot on the trail of marketing’s holy grail, the ability to measure return on investment (ROI) on every campaign.

These are laudable pursuits, up to a point. The trouble comes when marketers mistake the algorithm for the person. Humans, after all, are pesky creatures. We make decisions with our hearts as well as our heads. Our wants and needs can’t always be reduced to, or predicted by, data. Great marketers have always known this, which is why they work hard to build an emotional bond with the customers they are targeting. They tell compelling stories about their brands through memorable messages and indelible images. At its best, this kind of marketing pops and dazzles, like magic. Marketing that ignores the magic and relies on math and science alone will be marketing that doesn’t work.

So there’s a challenge here. Today’s marketers can’t succeed without the new technological and analytic tools; the tools offer insights that simply weren’t available in the past. But marketers also need a holistic view of the people they are trying to reach, in order to forge emotional connections. The two approaches—math and magic, to use shorthand—involve different skill sets and ways of thinking. Can they be combined?

We think they can, because a handful of leading companies are already assembling the ingredients of just such a combination. These companies focus relentlessly on their marketing priorities and their target customers, never getting sidetracked. To implement the priorities, however, they are heading down new paths. They figure out how to integrate the torrents of data into a single overarching view of the customer. They view marketing not through the usual categories—channels, media and so on—but through the omnichannel perspective of consumers. Instead of relying on what happened last year, they run sophisticated tests to determine what will be most effective in the future. (After all, what works with one person won’t necessarily work with another.) They continue to tell stories about their brand and to connect with consumers’ hearts as well as heads, but they do so in new ways. Contrary to the inclination of many marketers, moreover, they do not put measurement of ROI at the top of their agenda. When they can’t measure the ROI of an innovative effort, they are willing to let instinct guide their efforts—at least for a while.

To download report CLICK HERE.