Editor’s note: Christina Costa-Connolly is regional director for marketing research firm Infotools, U.K.
I spent a good part of my career examining customer experiences; seeking to understand the customer journey at every level. One thing I learned from this was that most companies can expect there to be a number of moments where they can have a potential interaction with their customer. From the customer seeing advertisements and other marketing outreach all the way to shopping online/in store, and from talking with friends to cruising social media for product reviews, these moments are everywhere. And here is where the problem lies: we need to combine data from all the interactions to form a truly holistic picture of the customer.
If we’re honest, trying to collate just a small part of this data in an easily manageable way is hard enough. Bringing in further layers like business metrics such as distributions, sellout and sell-in volumes, and even more traditional marketing research data such as claimed consumer attitudes, becomes a mammoth task. Connecting hard data to the underlying consumer behaviors in a way that makes sense is a struggle, but I believe it is a struggle that our industry is finally able to address head-on. With the right forward-thinking leaders and technology at our fingertips, we can go beyond just putting all this data together and actually find those relationships and patterns that can make a real impact on business decisions.
The reason we need to talk about this as an industry ties back to the fundamental way that the marketing model works: you invest in advertising, marketing or public relations and you want to evoke a response from your target audience. This response – we hope – will turn into an action that positively impacts the bottom line. But what if the link gets broken somewhere along the way? There is increased pressure on marketers to deliver results more efficiently so they need to know how exactly to talk to their customer and fix the broken link. Research, in theory, gives an indication of how to do this but we must bring together all the data from all the touchpoints and see where the relationships and patterns are in order to have a true understanding. In some cases, companies are so invested in doing more and more research that focusing on integrating the data already collected is too much of a stretch. Shifting their investment is a difficult pivot for them to accomplish despite the positive things that can be achieved.
It’s our job as marketing researchers to understand how we can get the most out of our research investment. We need to:
- explore some of the disruptive technologies that are out there that are now allowing us to align data from multiple sources at the front-end and find commonalities;
- uncover the innovations in the marketing research industry that allow us to integrate without affecting the integrity of the data sources, providing heightened confidence;
- illustrate how all that data can come together to provide the answers needed for effective, efficient customer outreach; and
- find ways to report and visualize the results that can speak to all the stakeholders – from the research-minded marketer all the way to the C-suite.
I’ve found that the most forward-thinking marketers recognize how vital data integration is to outcomes. Yes, it can be painful. There are so many mechanisms for collecting data that making them work together in a cohesive and supportive way is difficult. But after decades in the industry in various capacities, I feel that we are finally making strides toward real change on this front. We have the innovative thinkers and the technological capabilities available to us to capture, integrate and deliver insights from multiple consumer touchpoints and data sources. Now we need to help our internal decision-makers and research stakeholders understand how to shift our thinking for a holistic view of today’s complex customer.