I hate to admit it but my first career as a product manager at Cadbury was in the days of punched cards and data bureaus. Analysis took days but we were directly involved for effective decision making.
Today's data discovery and visualisation tools have been lapped up by marketing professionals who love eye-wateringly dazzling graphics and visualisations. But as the full article below makes clear, it is vital to move away from standalone analytics otherwise you run the danger of conflicting insights. Some business users will ignore outliers when these may well disprove current best practise theories.
Best practise requires that you embed analytics across the enterprises marketing applications and sales & financial apps. That ensure you use complete data. Best practice also says you should put analytics in the hands of the business user whilst ensuring this is from a secure and scalable BI platform.
Analytics is not an end in itself
- it is a vital part of all applications in order that decision makers can make and execute better decisions
Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed
Data analytics can be a game changer for marketing organizations. McKinsey’s DataMatics study showed that firms in the top quartile of analytics performance were 20 times better at attracting new customers and more than five times better at retaining existing ones than firms in the bottom quartile. But many companies struggle to realize the full potential of their analytics efforts. In a recent survey of senior marketing executives, only 10% of respondents said their organizations were very effective at applying analytics-generated insights about customer behavior.
