Making Big Data Actionable

The Art of Conversion

B i g Data

Making Big Data Actionable The new partnership between marketers and insight hunters David Krajicek  [email protected]

T

he synchronicity was striking— and not wholly coincidental. At a time when marketers were being asked to prove the return on their marketing investments as never before, the era of Big Data arrived with the promise of a metric for every nuance, a dashboard for each marketing effort. You could say that the digital economy began to feed on itself. Once it developed a taste for immediate learning, it became insatiable. And some marketers have come to see Big Data as a panacea, believing that in this brave new world of immediacy, all answers can be had through the digital data streams. The desire to do better may be noble, but are the expectations realistic? The big challenge of Big Data, as with so many things, is the ability to focus not on what is possible, but on what is meaningful. With so much information at their fingertips, marketers and their research partners

8

marketing insights spring 2013

can, and often do, fall into the “more is better” fallacy: The more sources of information we can leverage, the more likely we are to triangulate on the “right” answer. One could argue that the movement to big scorecards, where we just keep adding new information streams in the hopes of uncovering new relationships, has caused more problems and confusion than it has solved. Marketers don’t need another set of key performance indicators that correlate to KPIs that they already have. The number of tweets correlates to brand sales? That’s interesting, but so what? How does Twitter fit into a company’s overall marketing or customer relationship management strategy? Is the company intentionally engaging customers on Twitter; and, if so, to what degree are its efforts successful at impacting the volume and tone of tweets about the brand? More importantly, how do these efforts relate to a customer’s engagement with or use

of the brand? Just knowing something, and knowing it quickly, is not enough. We need rapidity and insight in the service of shaping and refining our business and marketing strategies.

Data gatherers give way to insight hunters

This new world is a challenge for researchers as well as marketers. Researchers are used to seeing data gathering as a key activity. Done well, quality data gathering is the foundation for quality insights. However, we now have access to more raw information than we know what to do with. Given the proliferation of information, the need has shifted. Researchers can’t simply be data engineers now but must be insight hunters. Insight hunters need to be closer to the business than to any specific analytic tool or technique. Understanding business strategy is paramount: The insight hunter must be able to successfully translate business objectives into an understanding of market dynamics, identify the information sources that represent these market dynamics and then mine these sources to evaluate success. To be clear, insight hunters can’t step away from the data; instead, they need to be looking at a broader data landscape, not at individual “cases” or “data sets.” They need to understand what actions are being taken in the market and be able to tailor their insight hunting from these actions.

Uncovering patterns is a whole new ball game

The insight hunter’s first job is stitching together information and patterns from different sources into an information ecosystem. We are a long

learn more! For more on the new research paradigm, turn to page 16.

way from the day when we will be able to simply press a button and “insights” instantly separate themselves from the data, like glowing pieces of gold in black sand. To have value, Big Data needs to be sorted by big thinkers, people who understand the dynamics of the market and can recognize what has relevance. This is really about “guided hunting” in identified information ecosystems. Some of the skills are the same—a sense of relationships and systematic thinking, say. However, the very nature of insight hunting requires comfort with an inherently messy environment, as opposed to a constructed one. Some researchers have a hard time with that. “If I can’t construct this experimental control, how can I give you an answer?” Many traditional research skills will translate well into the insight hunting environment, but there are attitudes and behaviors that will not. The foundation for the insight hunter’s success will, of course, be a set of clear objectives and strategy from the marketer. Successful hunting will happen when there is clarity of strategy and purpose.

Bringing data and users together

A core truth of information ecosystems is that one user’s extraordinary insight is another’s waste of time. Just as there are patterns within data, there also are categories of insights—and users to match those categories. Bringing relevant data to the right users is the insight hunter’s second key task. We are now at a time when platforms and computing resources can easily accommodate terabytes of data. However, it takes a collective effort—of marketers and researchers together—to build the impactful dashboards and architecture

that provide relevant insights that drive business change. In a sense, this requires some “pre-hunting”: anticipating data that has yet to be. And it means working in close contact with all potential users of that data to understand their goals, needs, levels of sophistication and tolerance for detail. To be clear, the advent of Big Data does not mean that we spend all of our time in the cloud looking at macro trends. We are kidding ourselves if we think that we can leverage the wealth that is Big Data and not also engage at the individual (or “little data”) level. Big Data is, in fact, made up of a series of little interactions, with individuals touching a brand through various direct and indirect activities. As such, the movement toward Big Data insights should always be interpreted through the prism of these individual interactions or relationships.

Driving action: the only outcome that matters

Creating pathways to action is the insight hunter’s third, and most important, task. Individual insight hunters need to know where to look, and that starts with an understanding of the business’ strategy and objectives. Research initiatives are always more successful when they are clearly tied to business objectives and to strategy. This is an imperative in the Big Data environment, where the choices and possibilities are boundless. Of course, the danger is that we build an insights ecosystem that is too narrow and shuts out certain discoveries just because we did not anticipate their existence. There always will be a tension between over-specifying our purpose and being too broad and vague to really

answer anything. The insight hunter needs to master this balance between insight and action, which essentially means mastering the nuances of the business strategy with which he is tasked to work. Historically, it has been harder to find individuals who demonstrated the balance between a business-savvy partner who understands market dynamics and, at the same time, is more focused on research excellence. This is because our tools and techniques required a lot of training, so it was somewhat more difficult to get someone who was adept in both areas. You had to “overdevelop” your research muscles because it was a heavier lift. But now, with more robust and powerful tools, and a proliferation of touch points or information sources, the pendulum is swinging. When it comes to information synthesis, knowing how to build the information ecosystems and how they may work together is more important than knowing how to run a regression.

Data-driven businesses

All of these challenges need to be met by marketers and freshly minted insight hunters in deeper collaboration than ever before. Big Data as an entity has no value. To drive actions, it must be shaped and enhanced by interpretation, distribution and collaboration at every step along the way. Dashboards, reporting tools—even infographics—need to be informed by core marketing goals and a sense of business purpose and strategy. Only then will information become insight and the business process truly improve. mI ✒ David Krajicek is CEO of GfK Consumer Experiences North America.

marketing insights spring 2013

9