Teradata Day 3: The Future Of Marketing Is Data-driven
In the digital age, marketing has evolved from its traditional roots to encompass new channels and with them lots of new data. As every device and every social media account holds a great amount of data, marketers are now looking to analytics as an investment to drive better engagement with consumers.
But ultimately, to drive value, marketing still has to be people-centric. Professor Andrew Stephen, Oxford University took to the Teradata Universe EMEA stage in London on the closing day to remind businesses of four key points their marketing strategies should consist of.
1. Be a whole brain marketer
The left-brain marketers are considered analytical and data driven while the right-brain marketers are more traditional and creativity-driven. Professor Stephen advises that for marketers to prepare for the new age, they should be whole brain marketers and marry the creative and the analytical by using data in more creative ways. According to Kantar's latest research, 71 per cent of over-performing brands embraced whole-brain thinking compared to the 42 per cent of the underperformers. Professor Stephen highlights that this does not necessarily mean that the individual marketers should be whole-brained but the team a marketer assembles needs to have these complementary capabilities as it leads to better business outcomes.
2. Go beyond customer centricity - be customer obsessed
Stephen underscored the need for marketers to understand their customer's needs better driven by data source and sophisticated analytics. "We should be obsessed in a good way, not in a stalking, creepy manner but we need to say more than just that customers are at the heart of everything that we do. We really need to be obsessed with them to make sure we always do phenomenal things for them and understand them deeply. This customer obsession needs to be fueled by data - a myriad data sources and sophisticated analytics," Stephen explained.
Giving an example of L'oreal, he said that when the brand felt that it did not know its customers enough, as it did not know the individuals, they created an AR app for make-up with their products. The app allowed people to scan their face and try different L'oreal products. This gave the brand data on how people were browsing their products and which ones they prefer and why. "It's giving a lot of data and knowing the customer requires a lot of data," Stephen added.
Data-driven services help to create better products, personalisation at scale and more valuable customer experiences and relationships.
3. Digitisation of everything
The world is increasingly digital and if a brand is in a business where the structure is very analog, the experience of the customer can still be improved digitally by thinking about how to remove the friction points for a customer.
The Disneyworld park in Orlando digitised the theme park with an IoT setup with the help of a band that each customer wears, called the MyMagic+. The band allowed Disneyworld to collect real-time data on its customers as they saw what people do and how they spend their time in the park. Stephen highlighted that with this data collected, the brand found ways to build better experiences to get people to want to come back.
"The notion of digitisation of everything has to start with the customer insight where either something is okay but not great, or infact something is problematic. We need data to fuel the systems of marketing's future and digitisation can help in securing that data," he added.
4. Be more human
In a world of marketing that's increasingly automated, in all the customer touchpoints that involve human interaction, marketers should be increasingly human. "The brands need to make a truly valuable human experience in a technology-enabled world because ultimately it's about the people. Currently, while marketing in a digital world, the winners are the ones who have embraced data, for the long term future, winners will be the ones who have done that but also figured out a balance between human and automated. It's essential to have the technology but not forget the human touch. The future of marketing is exciting as it's about people," Stephen concluded.
The journalist was hosted by Teradata for the Teradata Universe EMEA 2018.
