Think data... think BIGGER

Alright, so I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and just to make it clear up front, this isn't about data taking over the world, or owning creative, so hear me out here.

For the longest time, I worked as a database marketing,/CRM marketing analyst from the beginning of my career, to the more recent creative/digital roles og the agency world in China. Throughout these years, I have had my fair share of good and bad data moments where we either made and delivered something awesome or awful based on judgement and decision makings. 

One thing that has always intrigued me is the role of consumer data over the course of the last 2 decades. Both the volume (terabytes of it) and the type of data (social, digital, e-commerce, transactional, just to name a few) have grown and changed so much that most organizations are at a loss as to what to do with data. 

At the bare minimum, data allows us to deliver and provide better target channel marketing. That is almost a given, regardless of consumer behaviour or purchase behaviour.  Most of this should (well, at least they should) be handled by existing systems and infrastructure (Although crazily enough, I've also worked in an environment where we tried to build a CRM marketing suite but with no SQL database, no dashboard and no infrastructure to support decision making!)

The next level of influence comes in the form of knowledge/insights learn from a series of consumer data source and apply the learnings to other channels, products/services or creative/design. An example would be to conduct an e-commerce platform's past consumer behaviors and based on that 

The third level of influence provides a new way of building a long-lasting relationships with the audience in a much more lifestyle manner. The 'ME' generation doesn't just applied to the post-90s or the millennials, it is almost everybody. In an era where consumers probably know your products/services better than you do, it is even harder to conduct segmentation and clustering of consumers. Gone are the days where you can geographically or demographically group a certain traits or behavior.

There's this thing called the Internet which breaks a lot of the geographical rules on what sort of knowledge and information each individual are exposed to. me, this layer of digital marketing/marketing should be the norm for brands, if not already.

But there's more to it, the insights can further help  you to make changes that will eventually create a consumer lifestyle-oriented approach to marketing because you practically know how your consumer behaves, but instead of doing the old school CRM way in which it might scare the individuals by knowing them too much, we can build a more robust marketing programs to make the experience less intrusive.

The other side of the coin is that you can take these learnings and feed that into the business and instead of endless pages of charts and reports, it goes straight into the 'think tank'.

I'm not asking you to get rid of all your macro-level/global/trend type of research papers as they are still very relevant. In fact, we should bump up the priority of leveraging factual consumer data to think in conjunction with the research data when conducting business and marketing plans going forward.

It is time for marketing and creative professionals to acknowledge and embrace the power of consumer data (somehow I have all these mapped out in my head, and I will share that next time around)