In the early part of the evolution of marketing as a discipline there were a lot theories and strategies. Almost none of them were backed by data. Today, in the age of big data, marketers have an ocean of information but are struggling with how to use it. They capture every interaction with their customers – the sale, the after sales service, etc. and based on all this transactional information use predictive and lookalike models to forecast his future behavior. All of this based on his interactions with the brand. Pretty neat, Ah! Sounds simple and logical. In all this simplicity they almost always miss out on an important fact – What you don’t know about the customer can and will hurt your brand and business in the short and long run. There is a brand world and there is a customer world and they don’t collide. They co-exist and inter-mingle. The sooner we get it the better.
All of us have experienced on platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, MakeMyTrip, etc. that once you look at a product or offer they literally start trolling you. This in my mind is the crudest form of ‘intent’ marketing or trolling, if you please. One of my friends who had a back pain bought a massage oil on the advice of his yoga teacher, turns out that the oil was also a cellulite reducer and Amazon quickly concluded that he or his wife was pregnant and bombarded him with pregnancy related items! He certainly was not amused. His son is in the US and studying music, he travels three times a year to meet him, he loves different cuisines, loves performing arts, etc. and all this data is somewhere, he does almost all his searches online. But who will take the effort to understand him?
Currently, marketers look through a narrow prism of interaction with the brand. Though most of them talk about having moved to or striking a balance with ‘attention’ driven marketing to ‘context’ driven marketing, very few know how to move to ‘intention’ driven marketing. The most successful marketers pick up signals, aka – intentions and convert them into opportunities for their brand. Signals and intentions are a two-way street. The prospect/customer is going to look or is looking for something that will meet his needs/wants and the brand is looking for him. Probably the most fertile mating, eh, meeting ground, right?
Marketers are discovering that life in the fast-changing digital world is not so easy. But the fact is that the customer is leaving behind a host of signals outside the marketer’s ring-fenced data ecosystem. This can be effectively used to place the brand in the right place, at the right time and in the right context and solve the right problem for the right customer…this certainly is the right intention, right? Customers start their journeys towards making choices much before brands come to know of them. Using a mix of data and intent driven marketing, marketers can narrow this chasm. In his book, Pull, David Siegel wrote – ‘In the world of pull, you don’t own the customer, the customer owns you, your company’s economics are aligned with your customers. Companies that focus on results for customers will set the pace.’
It’s time for markets to move from interruptive marketing to intention marketing. Let’s stop taking things at face value or rather ‘Facebook’ value. Targeted marketing is after all not so targeted. I can assure you that a lot of people are not what they claim to be or write on their facebook wall. Zuckerberg once said – ‘the days of having a different image for your work, friends or co-workers and for the other people you may know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly, having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity’. However, he quickly added in the same breadth that the only ‘you’ that matters to facebook is the one it knows. Not the one you are!
Intelligent marketers are grappling with these issues – intent, context, content, conversation and closure. Let’s stop stereo typing the customer, let’s look beyond the typical segmentation techniques. The fact of the matter is that there is no one data set that can ideally describe who we are and what we want. It will always be multi layered. Going forward to get to the real intent and hence address a genuine need for customers, marketers will have to marry First party (transaction data), Second party (partner data) and third-party data. There are many facets to data – structured, unstructured, dark data, unrelated data. All of this cohesively brought together will result in better signaling and a much more accurate expression of intent by customers. We already live in an ‘intention rich’ and ‘attention poor’ economy and marketers will need to embrace this paradigm shift.
To operate in an intention economy, marketers will need to get comfortable with –

1. Dealing with complexity – look at ideas and signals across unrelated data points.
2. Let facts and data points evolve strategy. Not the other way around. If you have a ‘gut’ feeling or hypothesis test it with data.
3. Be nimble. Be willing to experiment. Be willing to change course at no notice.
4. Get intelligence driven partners on board.

Surely, its early days for the intention economy in India but as the Danish mathematician Piet Heim said – ‘to err and err and err again but less and less and less.’  Marketers will have to experiment and bet on new platforms, techniques and solutions. A combination of intelligence, data, technology, ability to take risks and their synthesis will drive the new customer era. And just so that I have the last word – Good intentions don’t last, an intelligent approach and relentless execution does.

1. A dynamic and always changing business environment.
2. Complex set of decisions to be made in real time.
3. A plethora of new technology and data streams complicating matters.
4. Too much focus on internal data or transaction data restricting the ability to think outside the box.
5. New Disruptive data driven models by competitors leading to an existential crisis.

Data is no longer a ‘broad ‘agenda to be paid lip service to. It must now become a ‘board’ agenda. Data-driven decision making is getting more and more ubiquitous. Every two days we create as much data as we did from the beginning of 2003. By 2025 the amount of data available will grow to 163 zettabytes a 10x increase in 10 years. By 2025 connected users are expected to be 75% of the world’s population. Real time data will increase at 150% the rate of overall data creation. There is not one business that has not been affected by data – finance, retail, manufacturing, medicine, media, automobiles, telecom, energy, etc. This data-quake should shake up the most resilient Boardrooms!
How do Boards and organizations ensure that data becomes an asset, drives productivity, ensure seamless operations and create new business models? We’re on the cusp of a revolutionary change in the way we do business and data is the flag bearer of this revolution.
According to a study by the International Institute of Analytics, businesses using data will see an additional surplus of $430 billion in productivity benefits by 2020 over organisations who are not using data. The International Data Corporation forecasts that over the next 3-5 years companies will have to commit to a data driven transformation on a gigantic scale including fundamental cultural and operational changes.
So how does one enable a data driven Boardroom? Organisations need to understand that data drives business value. Boardrooms that view data as a strategic asset will survive and thrive. Today every business needs an organization-wide data strategy not a siloed strategy. The key questions that need data driven answers are –

• How does our strategy increase revenues?
• How do we price our products and services to maximise value?
• How do we enhance customer experience to create a competitive advantage?
• What new products and services will we launch to stay relevant?
• How do we reduce costs and optimize efficiencies?
• How do I use external data to drive faster growth?
• How do I forecast sales more accurately?
• How do we protect our data?

The Boardroom now needs to take charge of a data driven transformation leading to accelerated business growth. It needs to ensure that data investments lead to business outcomes.  The Boardroom needs to shape the data driven organization of tomorrow. It must guide a change management plan that includes –

• A thought through business context-based data driven strategy that leads to solving complex problems in real time. For example, at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), being data driven means dramatically reducing the new drug development cycle from eight years to one year using analytics and computer simulations. Imagine the value such a development can generate. Organisations and Boards can pick on a few such initiatives and pilot projects that lead to business outcomes and have the potential to dramatically alter their fortunes.
• A digital transformation strategy that pushes fundamental imperatives like automation, business efficiencies, data compatibility, technology compatibility, include different solutions like IoT, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Analytics models leveraging data assets to create a sustainable and differentiated business model. Boards should facilitate a transformation/innovation budget and create Data Innovations Labs to test multiple such initiatives.
• Creation of a Data Advisory Council to drive competitive advantage, create new revenue streams, measure impact of initiatives taken. In short, sweat the data assets to propel growth and generate shareholder value.

These can be some of the foundation blocks that the Boardroom can initiate for a strong data-driven strategy. It is certainly not an easy ask but boardrooms will have to embrace this new reality and respond with agility to stay relevant and stay in business. It’s high time that data becomes a Boardroom priority.