Barbara Vitt – Deutsche Bahn

Barbara Vitt is the Head of Marketing Technologies & Analytics at Deutsche Bahn and is responsible for the use and processing of marketing data at the group. She primarily focuses on the further development of customer-centricity within marketing. With around 336,000 employees in 130 countries, Deutsche Bahn is one of the world’s leading mobility and logistics companies. The group is active in three major markets: passenger transport, infrastructure and services, and transport and logistics.

The Marketing KPIS of Deutsche bahn

Among the most relevant KPIs in the group are the index values ​​from tracking on brand perception and reputation. Data collected at a higher level of aggregation helps to better understand how the various marketing activities are received by customers and the general public. Barbara explains: “We look very closely at our brand values ​​and how the different dimensions perform. For the Deutsche Bahn brand, we have set target values ​​for various brand attributes, which we of course also continuously track and analyse. Our market research department supplies such data. We have been collecting data for many years with our ad tracking and brand image measurement. And of course, we analyse how our marketing measures perform.”

Acting more customer-centred is not just an empty phrase, it is about understanding the needs of customers even better and addressing them in a more targeted manner, finds Barbara. This requires an overarching data landscape that connects the data silos from the individual business areas of the group. She elaborates: “We want to implement a customer-centred approach. Therefore, we need to ensure that we focus on customers. We design our technologies and data landscape in such a way that knowledge about our customers and other data are processed in a manner that we can derive decisions that are not just business-specific, but customer-centric.”

turning data into actions

According to Barbara, the DB Group, as a leading mobility and logistics company, has already embraced the data-driven world and is actively working with data. Data is used in many different areas, such as production, operation, and customer management. But like many other companies, the group experiences the challenge of converting data into actions, notes Barbara: “One of the challenges DB faces is turning data into actions. This applies to the entire group, not just marketing. There are areas where we are very advanced, and we already do a lot with data. But there are also areas where we still have a long way to go.”

Another challenge for the group is the necessary cultural change. The fear of working with data has not completely faded in all areas yet. Integrating data into everyday life and taking away people’s fear of data are hurdles that still need to be overcome, tells Barbara: “There is consensus about us going this way and using our data to make decisions. This is being actively promoted at the top management level and processed at operational levels. We anticipate that this will result in further efficiency gains and increases in effectiveness. At the end of the day, we want to be able to spend our marketing euros more efficiently. For the budget spend, I want to achieve a better advertising impact and higher sales. We have also invested a lot of know-how in this strategy because we are convinced that it is the right way to go. We know that not everything can be changed overnight. A data-driven world or data-driven decisions only work if the necessary infrastructure and the will to change are at hand.”

“There is consensus about using our data to make decisions. (…) We anticipate that this will result in further efficiency gains and increases in effectiveness. At the end of the day, we want to be able to spend our marketing euros more efficiently.”

THE FOCUS ON CUSTOMER-CENTRIC MARKETING

Barbara and her marketing department work on a 360-degree-view on marketing measures. To achieve this, data from different streams must be linked even more closely together. According to Barbara, the goal is to streamline access to DB for customers and to make personalised offers: “We have come a long way in online marketing and have implemented systems that enable us to make very concrete decisions based on data. However, it is also important to amalgamate data from other strands. Here and there we could have an even more customer-centric view, we still think very strongly from the media plans and creatives point of view. We are in the process of better understanding the complexity of customer journeys and recognising what customers want in this journey. To accomplish that, we are setting up our data infrastructure in such a way that we know how a passenger is behaving. We want to make situational and personalised offers and streamline access to DB even more. Of course, data protection aspects also play a very important role. With everything we do, we ensure that it is data protection compliant.”

“We are setting up our data infrastructure in such a way that we know how a passenger behaves. We want to make situational and personalised offers and to streamline access to DB even more.”

Outlook on the future

For the future, Barbara hopes that marketing managers will be able to use data and tools in their decisions as easy and user-friendly as possible. And that data and technologies are implemented in such a way that the focus is placed on the customer, and intelligent and modern marketing communication is made possible. But not all processes and decisions can be automated; the need for human decisions remains, says Barbara: “In the future, we will have processes that are automated based on customer behaviour. But when it comes to our brand or image-building campaigns, a human decision will still be required. The focus is then rather on what you can learn from the data and how you interpret it.”