David Meer
Reflection by
Mona Abu-Amr
Theory is the starting point:
In this part, the author addresses analysts who will quickly be overwhelmed by the amount of data available about customers’ preferences. Relatively, random data analytics will not lead to any improvement of certain services if it was not theory-based. Theory provides a clear strategic pathway to follow on data analytics in order to come out with new feasible trends that attract new customers, and work on improving certain provided services. However, to widen the circle of target customers, there should be a clear hypothesis to start with about customers’ needs and how to make them valuable. Once the required data has been gathered to test the assumed hypothesis, the analysis will usually lead to specific ideas for developing winning value propositions and take them to market. Greater division, gathering customers and predictions based on similar behaviors or preferences, is able to generate greatly effective targeting strategies.
A Day in the Life:
A clear evidence of introducing new trends in the market goes back to the mid-1980s, when the introduction of barcode scanning enabled firms to collect information about customers at the checkout register. Data was limited before then; firms only knew what they shipped, what people bought. However, with the introduction of scanners, they could actually monitor all details happening at the sale point. The arrival of this new technology, a number of missteps occurred in the early years of it. Sale executives mainly focused on the effect of price promotions on sales and did not pay the required attention to marketing fundamentals, brand equity and brand reputation building. In the last 30 years; however, firms and companies worked on coming up with more sophisticated statistical models and re-gathered their energy, and scanners became the biggest advantage to consumer marketing and trade. Nowadays, additions were added to sale knowledge and included loyalty card data. This card gives retailers an overview of what individual households purchase, and online shopping behavior. Undoubtedly, everyone in the market strives to apply all the new trends aiming at attracting customers more than focusing on collecting information that help gathering the missing pieces of those trends. Analytics of collected information can definitely help coming up with improvements on new trends that can very much work not only on expanding the circle of customers but also on building a long term strong relationship of trust between customers and service providers. Building up this trustworthy relationship can be a strong asset to any firm, which undoubtedly can help in understanding customers’ future preferences and ongoing ascending needs. Therefore, smart big firms would make the right decision when they carefully step back using a new trend considering the importance of Big Data analytics.
Learning to Walk:
Acquiring, harmonizing, and mining new data sources in the first times almost always lead to interesting new insights. In the first steps of gathering these insights, it will be significant to have them open to new approaches and to diverse customer backgrounds and interests. As diversity gives corporations a greater experience with a wider set of potential approaches, and determines which ones should be applicable in different situations.
In addition, success stories should be shared with other business units and countries to build enthusiasm and to have various hypotheses for various customers’ needs. The openness of data to change is significantly major, for a certain geographical area is possibly open to changing customers’ interests and backgrounds. Learning new things about customers is very often to occur over time, which rises up some questions about certain products, services, and strategies. Consequently, questioning the whole set of policies and strategies can be hard. It’s rather recommended to undertake a few changes than reforming the whole set of strategies and rules at once. Before conducting a change, study if the effort and cost required for a certain product, geography, and problem justifies the undertaking or not!
Should there be a worry that BIG DATA will distract some firms' managers from being customer-centric?
Big data is a running vein of gold for firms. However, the core current challenge is combining and analyzing even more data to generate customer-centric services. Customers are hard to have fixed wants and needs to optimize against. Customers have freedom and control to shop whenever, wherever, however they choose; however, marketers should continually keep the hard work up in order to provide the most relevant information about customers during each interaction. That means more data collected about customers’ lifecycle, the quickest firms should be responsive enough to the ongoing changing dynamics of customers, competitors, and marketplace. In order for big firms and companies to sustain their campaigns echo, they should put customers’ big data at the center of the marketing program.
Big firms are advised to flip their thinking around and enhance the customer-centric trend that Big Data makes easier. Deploy Cross-Channel Offers, Move beyond transactional offers, and Embed a test-and-learn method across the marketing program are three customer-centric effective strategies to make advantage of the available customer big data.
Deploy Cross-Channel Offers:
Marketing in more channels for the sake of only it is not the main objective in here. The most important of all is that brands know how to perform well in the channels they use. In other words, marketers should approach and serve customers in a contact strategy that is channel neutral. Customers should not have the feeling of forcing them to buy a certain product more than marketers try to help them find what they need. Thinking about who their customers are and how different segments choose to engage with the brand is more effective and profitable than just selling a product for the sake of selling. This keeps an eye on how to best match up customers with relevant offers to their needs, working in channels that best support this kind of interaction works best in widening the circle of a certain brand’s customers.
Move beyond transactional offers:
According to Forrester Research, more than eight in 10 consumers researched a product before they purchased it; this involved both low- and high-consideration items. Furthermore, one-third of these purchasers expressed their willing to be updated about any brand launched new products. Obviously, consumers care more about content than just offers. Combining a variety of data streams definitely helps marketers understand where customers are in their lifecycle. This understanding leads to delivering the most relevant mix of information in order to strengthen the relationship between marketers and customers and drives revenue.
Embed a test-and-learn method across the marketing program:
Using data to understand how marketing programs affect customer lifetime is essential to marketing programs. For example, it’s easy to perform a yes no simple test to customers at the check-out register asking about a certain service. This can bring value and profitability, and makes it easy for marketers to decide what marketing tips to use in order to extend the circle of their customers.
For instance, it’s easy trying to figure out if the add-to-cart button is better in red or blue. That’s really just a simple tip in combining and analyzing data from a variety of sources. However, it provides marketers with a detailed picture of who customers are and what they want.
