Three Critical Steps for Data-Driven Success

In today’s landscape, businesses need to look for any competitive advantage they can to ensure their survival, growth and success. A key aspect of gaining a competitive advantage is using data-driven insights to empower decisions for marketing, consumer insights, consumer segmentation, and operations, such as merchandising and real estate. 

Especially within large companies, it is often common that your siloed marketing, customer insights, and operation intelligence groups (real estate, merchandising, etc.) all have different capabilities, different data sources, and vastly different goals. This leads to varied usage of data, insights drawn from competing or incompatible datasets, and potentially faulty decisions based on flawed inputs.

Here is the fastest path to avoid this pitfall.

Many companies immediately jump right to selecting a vendor without doing a thorough analysis of what resources are available internally. The idea of “big data” sounds appealing for many teams until “big data” lands on the company doorstep and chaos ensues. 

For example, let’s say a quick-service restaurant (like a fast-food chain) wants to open up a new location. If this strategic task of finding the perfect new location is given to each team individually, different departments will likely end up with different results. The real estate team may recommend one area, while the consumer insights team has a different recommendation based on a best-customer profile– meanwhile, marketing is running on its own path. This lack of coordination hurts investment and ROI.

Making sure these siloed departments are unified and working together is the first order of business. While many companies have moved toward hiring a Chief Data Officer (CDO) to help create a data unification program and enact a data-first culture, really, any Data & Analytics (D&A) leader can help spark this evolution with a deep dive into the current data landscape in the company. 

In a 2021 press release, Gartner® puts it succinctly: “If the CDO does not exert influence across the organization by promoting data sharing, engaging stakeholders and training the workforce to become data literate, they will likely not perform well in their role.” 

Find a vendor partner who can provide a holistic solution, across customer intelligence, marketing intelligence, and operational intelligence. “By 2024, the lack of unified marketing technology to identify, locate and target buyers will introduce a new data intelligence platform to enable marketing effectiveness,” said Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer at Ventana Research. “By 2025, over one-half of organizations will determine that the chaos of digital technology usage requires a rationalization of vendors to ensure operational excellence.