Consumer-Centric Growth

There has never been a better time to be in the Data, Analytics & Insights space!

More than ever, I am convinced that the Brands and companies that will win on a sustained basis are the ones that are focused on the consumers or customers they serve. Today data, analytics & technology have opened doors and possibilities to do this like never before.

In Analytics & Insights at P&G we’re focused on driving Business growth via serving our consumers.?Everything we do is built into the business from strategy down to execution in-store and in-media.?To do that effectively, we know we must continually reinvent the work to keep up with an ever-changing landscape.?

In this changing landscape, our job is to drive constructive disruption in a way that drives growth and creates value for the sectors in which we play and the consumers we serve. ?The constructive disruption we are driving is taking us to a new S curve in Analytics & Insights.

We hold ourselves accountable for three outcomes:?Discovering Opportunities for future growth, Driving Consumer Focus in our Brand and Innovation plans, and Actioning Growth & Productivity Drivers with a focus on Media and Retail Analytics.

In a world that is changing so fast, the importance of discovering opportunities cannot be overstated. ?However, it’s importance is matched by its complexity.?What has happened before, you can codify and predict, but what has not happened before, you must conjecture and anticipate. ??

Both prediction and anticipation have their places in opportunity identification.???

Opportunities like demographics can be codified and are very predictable. No one should be surprised that the 2020 census concludes that all the population growth in United States over the last decade has come from multi-cultural groups. ?The key question becomes not what the future will hold, but what we should do to prepare for it.

In our case, knowing that our success has always been grounded in deeply understanding and reflecting the diversity of consumers made us raise the bar on Equality & Inclusion as both a force for growth and a force for good. One of the largest business growth opportunities in the U.S., and in many markets worldwide, is in the multicultural market – serving the Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific, and Native consumers.?

The realization of that business opportunity starts with the right representation of all consumers, in our research, panels and data sets we leverage and algorithms we code.?It’s the right thing to do to ensure all consumers’ voices are represented and it’s an imperative for our businesses.

It’s the right thing to do to ensure all consumers’ voices are represented and it’s an imperative for our businesses.

Today opportunity exists to codify and predict many other vectors for growth.

However, not everything, can be easily codified and predicted.?The world is a far more complex a place. That’s where we leverage Anticipatory Insights. Anticipatory is being able to connect the dots to define future consumer and market scenarios.??This ensures we are prepared for and anticipate the wide range of potential outcomes and opportunities that may present themselves to us.?

The pandemic that we are in was not and still is not predictable.?However, we can and did anticipate the increase in health and hygiene needs for consumers.?It led us to take actions ahead of the pandemic across several of our businesses. Anticipation recognizes the uncertainty of the world and focuses on possible scenarios and actions needed in the business context.??

It is the role of Data, Analytics, and Insights leaders to continuously innovate to step change our ability to do both - predict what we can codify and anticipate what we cannot.

To do this, we need transformation along the trifecta of Human + Data + Technology. Each of these is important when looking at the totality of Analytics & Insights. ?We need innovation in each of them and we achieve breakthroughs with innovations that integrate all three of the vectors.

It all starts with our Consumer -- or the Humans we are trying to serve.?Human behavior and the whys behind that behavior are and will continue to be at the heart of brand building. ?For us there isn’t a substitute to taking time to observe real consumers, in real contexts doing their everyday jobs. It generates hypotheses, inspires innovation, and sparks go to market creativity.

Data is the next component.?Data sets can validate our hypotheses, enable optimization, and predict outcomes. But, to do that they need to be complete and representative of populations we are serving. ?An algorithm is only as good as the data upon which it was trained.?If the training set is biased, so too will the results be biased.?

On Technology.?Just like in Marketing field we have MarTech, there are many technologies that we need to drive the future of Analytics & Insights. We call them InTech - a short for Insight Technology. These include technology building blocks like sensors, image recognition, Virtual Reality and of course ML/AI applications that allow us to leverage Human Insights and Data sets in an effective and efficient manner.

While each of these are big on their own, when you bring them together, Human + Data + Technology you can transform the world of Analytics & Insights.?That’s the next frontier that we are focused on.

The skills needed to enable this are a combination of hard and soft skills. We need Human, Behavioral and Data science skills and increasing with technology application skills. We also need unbridled curiosity and a growth mindset. In a world changing so fast, it’s the faster learner and innovator who wins!?