What Data-Obsessed Marketers Don’t Understand

As big data has become an important factor in marketing field, the marketing communication strategy should be both effective and efficient using big data. It means that only data-driven approach alone is not what makes marketing move. For effective and efficient delivery of marketing communication, there should be a content that makes an emotional connection with customers.

This is why people believe today’s obsessed marketers are at risk of cultivating only half of a brain (Soroman & Frank, 2014). Before we get into that, people are aware of our both brains have different jobs. “Left brain for logical thinking and right for creative thinking.”

According to Sorofman & Frank (2014), they developed the intelligent brand framework to provide a structure for thinking about marketing investments across creative and operational disciplines, using a combination of data-driven and human-centric approaches.

Data-Centric is where data sources being gathered for marketers to see patterns, make predictions, measure results, and other activities for optimization. Therefore, this area is called “observation.” Marketers can obtain customer’s insight in this area. For example, famous marketing company, P&G should be in this quadrant. They conduct a lot of researches before and after a launch of new product.

Next is Human centric and strategic area, called “inspiration.” Marketers use crowdsourcing to collect intelligence of human beings. Customer’s decision making process and emotional touch are taken in this area.

Third quadrant is data-centric and operational area. With collective data, marketers do segmentation, targeting, positioning and other many operational works in this area. It’s called “automation.” This area is about usual operations for marketers.

The last area is called “engagement.” In here, brand messages become authentic human dialogues, so many social interactions are occurred in this quadrant. Ultimately, brand is being humanized here. For instance, the companies that make efforts on listening to customer’s voice with real time to increase their loyalty and advocacy are in good position for engagement with their customers. Various communication activities including marketing communication are performed in this quadrant, especially, emotional bonding performance with its brands.

In conclusion, to build a strong brand and successful marketing communication campaign, marketers must look over every four quadrants by using brain and heart as well, meaning by strategic and emotional balancing each other. Only data-driven marketing can cause lack of authenticity in communication message.

Questions

1) Which quadrant is more important for a new brand?

2) Is is possible to represent every quadrant?

Reference

Sorofman, J. & Frank, A. (2014). What data-obsessed marketers don’t understand. HBR Blog Network, Retrieved from http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/what-data-obsessed-marketers-dont-understand/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29