Data-driven marketing in 2021

Blog Jori van de Spijker – Managing Consultant

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in Data-Driven Decision Making. With good reason, because since the beginning of digitisation, more and more data has become available. Terms such as big data, machine learning, and AI were all around us. The enthusiasm was evident, also at board level; as a CMO you know that there is a lot of data available from websites, sales, social media, PR, and consumer research. Where brands used to be dependent on their research agency for information, companies have realised over the past decade that they have a lot more in-house, and can and should do more with it.

But after the initial enthusiasm, the grass was not always as green as hoped. On paper, it sounds simple, but in practice, many organisations have run into the chaos of data. One data stream is weekly, the other per minute, per month, in Excel, CSV, at an aggregate level, at a consumer level, and so on. And then privacy legislation made it all even more difficult to connect these different data streams easily. It became an enormous challenge for companies to make sense of it all. It was interesting to see that some organisations failed, while others made extra investments.

Exemption

Parallel to investing in Data Analytics teams and data warehouses, data-driven decision making is now also becoming a topic on the marketer’s agenda. This makes it an excellent topic to use as this year’s Brand Growth theme. In recent years, we have done a lot of research on marketing and brand growth ourselves, but also in partnership with Marketing Week, NIMA, and IAB Netherlands. From these studies, we saw that data is becoming increasingly important and is the foundation behind how modern marketers work. Marketing has remained the same, but marketers need to be able to work with data more and more often. And I think that is a healthy development for the profession. In the past, marketing often had an exemptional position; every department had to account for its finances, except the marketing department, whose main objective was to create great campaigns. The result was that marketing lost authority within the organisation because they could not provide insight into the direct contribution and ROI. With more use of data, there are opportunities for marketers to put themselves on the map more strongly internally.

Contradiction

Another interesting insight, and one we saw particularly in the IAB C-level report, is that there is a huge contradiction. On the one hand, data is talked about a lot, and data warehouses are ready and waiting. But on the other hand, relatively little use is made of it. Marketers feel they must start working with data more but are also reluctant to take up the task themselves. It is 2021, so you can no longer brush it aside, but when companies blindly focus on data, you may wonder what is left of the creativity and skill of a marketer. You must look beyond the data, but you must understand the data first. In our conversations with marketers, we already notice a clear division between professionals who embrace data and those who consider it a threat to the profession. This friction, among others, is why I am looking forward to exploring the theme further this year. We already had the first interviews, and we have spoken with companies where data has been widely implemented, but also with parties where the purpose is considered more important. Different strategies are being chosen, and I am curious to know what the ingredients for success are. But also, how marketers look at data, and what they expect from agencies. In short, another fantastic theme to look forward to and learn about in 2021.