How to be driven by more than Data...

The term “Data-Driven” is in our everyday language. It’s often used as an attempt to succinctly describe the role of analytics and market research in business decisions. However, I strongly feel that it has been damaging to us as a profession and ultimately reduces the perception of our role to solely providing data points and dashboards to the business. The rise of data-driven has also seen the decline in the role of truly impactful insights, and this is a balance that needs to be addressed. Let’s look at the case of one of the most talked about topics of the past year, everyday health during the pandemic.

Rarely have data been more on the radar than at present. The impact data has had on the everyday lives and health of billions of people has been significant. Incidence and R values have become part of common language. Like many working from home, I am glued to my smartwatch statistics to confirm I have actually moved enough today and have stepped outside of my house.

No question, data is omnipresent, and it is essential. Nonetheless, I believe that one of the biggest disservices we have done to the Market Research profession over the past few years is to focus too much on being “data-driven.” With that term, we often reduce the value and output we can provide to being a number, a dashboard, a metric, something you get on a Friday afternoon. Is everything ok? Is it green? Red? Amber? But this is not how you build long-lasting success stories for businesses and brands.

Let me be clear here, I do not question there is value to being truly data-driven for businesses in many areas. However, there is a real risk, when insight and analytics professionals work with data, that we allow this focus to dilute and diminish our inputs, outputs and overall value.

More than facts, figures, and numbers

If you want to make decisions that drive success, you need more than a traffic light indicator. How can you engage with people if you do not understand them beyond a measurement? That is why creating a great customer experience is about much more than facts, figures, and numbers. In the end, it comes down to a full understanding of what your audience, your customer or your employee thinks, needs or desires. Gathering this deeper human understanding is crucial for driving action, engagement, and growth. Knowing their motivations, tensions and behaviours is how you can give meaning to data.

At this point, we bring consumer insights to play to make the magic happen. Getting to know humans at a deeper level gives us genuine and much more accurate insights. They contextualise relevant data in a meaningful way and improve the speed and quality of decision-making – the holy grail! By going further than short-term actions, we can truly empathise with people, and better meet their needs with our products and services.

For me, this is how successful companies distinguish themselves from others. Truly customer centric companies go beyond talk about the needs and desires of consumers and customers on their website, and in their annual report - they use actionable insights for key business decisions and to define core processes. Sounds good, but beware: not everything we may often call an insight is necessarily actionable (or even a true insight).

Example: how to make it actionable?

If we take the example of the pandemic. Research shared by GSK Consumer Healthcare and IPSOS revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly had a significant impact on people’s behaviour and attitudes to their everyday health. Key findings from this research, which surveyed 4,400 participants aged between 16 and 75 years old in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (UK), were that the coronavirus pandemic incited Europeans to adopt new everyday health habits. 65% of people across the four countries are now more likely to consider their health in day to day decision making. The vast majority of these people consider it vital to take their health into their own hands to relieve pressure on healthcare systems. We know the numbers and percentages: Spain 84%, UK 77%, Italy 75%, Germany 63% - but what does that mean? Why are these people behaving in this way? And where could there possibly be a role for us to play?

To learn more, we tracked the changes and interpreted their impact through additional research. One example is a self-ethnography piece we did in cooperation with IPSOS. We were present (virtually) in the homes of people in almost real-time. Participants were filming themselves during the various stages of lockdowns and telling us what was going on in their day. They shared their thoughts, fears, smiles, and tears via WhatsApp, WeChat, or other platforms. What’s important here is that our focus was not on the products they used or what treatments they were taking when they felt unwell. We were focusing on their needs and tensions in those moments. Our goal was to understand where they were looking for solutions or actions. Leveraging this deeper understanding, we found territories around moments of comfort, of ‘rest time’, of ‘me time’, of social activities where there was little or no activity from our competitors.

So we flipped our perspective: we looked firstly at a broad understanding of these people's lives to then see what role (if any) our brands could maybe play within it. In the next step, we adapted our communications, innovations, and solutions. We focused on understanding, not data. The data gave us clues, but it didn’t give us actionable answers. This human aspect of insights is the part that is often neglected, squeezed, easy to remove when you focus on streams of data over everything else. But unless you can bring the two areas together, you will fail at both.

How do we bring it all together at GSK Consumer Healthcare ?

Our purpose is to “deliver better everyday health with humanity.” We want to build deeper human understanding in all we do - the source and amplifier to consumer engagement and long-term success. That means, by putting the consumer at the heart of our thinking and processes, we can then better understand and identify their motivations and needs and build empathy. Of course, data plays a pivotal role in our thinking in our CBIA team (Consumer & Business Insights and Analytics) at GSK Consumer Healthcare. The difference we make is that we consider we drive human understanding by being data-fueled, insights-led, and ultimately results-driven. That is the essential layer that sits on top; the link between insights and action that gets you to engagement and success, driven by a natural curiosity to understand not just what, but why...

In addition, we think about consumers, customers, or experts as individuals; it is fundamental to lean in. It is not enough to care; you need to commit, and you need to connect with people outside of transactional, short-term, interactions.

Get out of the ivory tower!

Finally, another success factor in our Deeper Human Understanding is how insights are coming to life across the company. We are ensuring that they are not a specialist skill that resides solely in the insights team but that the entire organisation should be capable of building, testing and interpreting actionable insight, from Procurement to sales and Customer Support to Marketing. Share knowledge and make sure that it is embedded and not a siloed task of a dedicated function or a service provider. A powerful insight can have more than nine lives if you make it easily available across the business.

That is why we have done a lot of work creating a shared understanding of what an insight is. For instance, in addition to our capability builds, we also live the behaviour day-to-day. We involve consumers and experts through our innovation processes, and we invite consumers to meetings to share their stories. Our team in India has a regular “consumer obsession” day where everybody from the Chief Executive Officer to colleagues across Commercial, Insights, Legal, Procurement and HR share best practice examples or hear stories and learnings from different industry speakers.

Is it a success? Yes! We now make more business decisions than ever based on the learnings we have from these initiatives, behaviours and processes. Actionable insights from diverse people empower us to develop products or services that better meet their needs and help us to deliver better everyday health with humanity and we will continue to push this even further.

So, don’t let the data drive you… firstly, let insights shape the data you focus on, and then let that data be the fuel that drives your insight engine!