Marketing strategy – when data drowns vision

Today’s marketers can hyper-personalise messages and automate activation, through an ever-growing number of channels and conversations. We can all leverage technology to offer so much choice and so many potential ways to reach customers, with so much immediate feedback that even with a brilliant, layered dashboard bringing it all together, marketers can easily become mesmerised by the day-to-day, and become trapped in a metrics maze.

Granular real-time metrics are useful and can demonstrate short-term ROI, but there is also the risk that the focus shifts from ‘How am I building brand value?’ to ‘How can I drive another 0.2% CTR on that channel?’

Sometimes it seems that we’re losing the strategic skills and oversight, and the critical question emerges: Have we sacrificed strategic vision and courage at the altar of immediate metrics?

Of course, marketing needs to demonstrate short-term ROI but this should not be at the expense of building long-term brand equity. The risk is that even senior marketers can become blinded by the glut of well-intentioned daily data and sometimes lose sight of ‘why’. To me the most important jobs of a good marketing leader are not to ignore the data but to:

1. Have a really strong, informed sense of the market gained from a few different trusted sources, underpinning a few specific three to five-year brand objectives, which deliver for customers and thus everyone else: the Board, investors and employees.
2. Stay informed about daily team activity but also ‘trust your gut’ now and then: stay with the big calls and the precise, clear direction of travel, using that compass to make the day-to-day decisions.
3. Stay out of the weeds: one Google ad that drove a load of traffic, one programmatic campaign that fizzled out, one PR opportunity seized by you or a competitor; these are just part of the mosaic and should not distract too much from the big picture. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
4. Based on the strategy, strip down or summarise the data into 3-5 higher-level KPIs for the brand and its marketing. Promote these among your leadership teams and the company.
5. Take any and every opportunity to coach others in what the brand stands for and how its value is measured.

This isn’t an argument to abandon data altogether - but it is an argument for balance! Data should inform decisions, not dictate them.

Have no doubt: durable companies, with ongoing high market value, always have a clear, strong brand strategy at their heart. Great marketing powered by core skills in strategy and insight drives measurable longer-term value in your brand which everyone – CFO to lab tech - can see, feel and hopefully even describe. Marketing isn’t just about today’s numbers. It’s about building something enduring — a brand that resonates and relationships that last. Poor marketing that lacks strategy means marketers are left reacting in knee-jerk fashion to the latest bump in the road. This erodes brand value, demotivates everyone and will cost the company significantly in the long term.

We need to steer clear of those rabbit holes. The best marketing isn’t just measurable; it’s memorable!