Demystifying Digital and Data
I cringe and roll my eyes internally whenever I hear companies talk about how digitally mature they are because they have a nice looking website, are on all the latest social channels and have adopted a dozen of MarTech tools but not entirely sure how they are measuring success or what they are truly trying to achieve.
Being digital goes beyond just a nice looking website, be on all the latest social channels and buying all the fancy MarTech tools so you look like you are at the forefront of digital adoption. It’s also to avoid creating a data and digital dumpster.
Yes, there is such a thing as too much data and digital tools.
On the flipside, there is also such a thing as over reliance on one single platform/tool, person or process to try and help you make sense of the data you have or enable your business.
“Wait a minute”, I hear you say. “What am I supposed to do if both scenarios are not ideal?.”
I was recently inspired to write something about this after attending a few forums speaking about digitalization, data analytics, Gen AI and MarTech.
It depends on a few factors:
what are your objectives for using this tool or platform?
what are you trying to achieve and what insights are you trying to gather with the data collected?
how does the tool and data help you achieve your objectives?
what are you current processes like that will either hinder or enable you to fully utilize the tool and data collected?
what are the current skillsets and mindsets of your people that again will either hinder or enable you to maximize the tool and data?
what matters most when it comes to choosing the right tool?
what matters most when it comes to analyzing the data collected?
have you tested other tools serving a similar nature and what are the test steps you have used?
how are you collecting your data, storing, managing and analyzing it? What do you do with the insights gathered?
understand the pros and cons of multiple tools/platforms versus single tool/platform and their impact on your objectives and desired outcomes.
Some companies have chosen to stick to certain tools because they have invested a lot of time, money and effort on it despite it not meeting their needs. Some companies have chosen to over rely on just one or two people to be their so-called power users and are almost at the mercy of these folks.
Both scenarios create what we call bad behavior almost like a bad relationship where you know deep down it’s not quite right but you are so entrenched it feels like you need to live with it. What happens then is they abandon the tools bought or underutilize it (especially in the first scenario) and buy yet another tool without first understanding what is it that is not working well.
The other possibility is to hire an expert to either train your users or join your company and end up being at their mercy especially if you as the function or business owner doesn’t have a clue as to what you are trying to achieve, what the tool is capable of and its limitations, and how you intend to sustain the use of the tool if your needs change.
The way I prefer to work and advise my clients have always been to really deep dive into their pain points, current processes, people capabilities, business and marketing objectives , outcomes they want to achieve and how they want to measure success.
If I know for sure that there is a more effective platform or tool to help them achieve what they need, I will not hesitate to advise them to bite the bullet and consider another tool. Likewise, if I know the issue is not the tool but their current lack of knowledge or a gap in their processes, then I will work with them on addressing that gap instead.
A critical part of change management is mindset and behavioral change, and enablement of the people with the right skillset, supportive processes and therefore cultivating a supportive mindset to adapt to the change.
There is no one-size fits all, so what matters more is to be open to learn about different options available out there, not just what you are comfortable with or what others are using.
Psst - For data analytics, there are - tableau, amazon quicksight, power bi, looker, qilk, apache spark just to name a few commonly used ones. I have my personal favorites but it depends again on the factors I mentioned above.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
The Case of the Misunderstood MarTech - Concept of “Power Users”
There was once a bakery who was trying to get better at creating more pastries for their increasing customer base at a more efficient manner, including pastries on demand and that can accommodate different dietary preferences. They had a head baker who is also the owner of the bakery, 2 baking assistants, a cashier, 2 servers and 1 marketing person who also oversees pop-ups at designated customer events.
One day, a baking supplier introduced them to this state of the art baking oven that seemed to be everything they have ever wanted; customized settings allowing for tailored dietary needs, self regulating temperature control to avoid burnt pastries, pre-set recipe function so they can just choose any setting easily, pop in the ingredients and get their key pastries all done without having to keep referencing the recipe list each time they bake.
The supplier said the best part of this new oven is that anyone can be a baker and everyone should learn to be a baker using this oven. However, the training comes at an additional cost though they will be accredited as professional xx oven practitioner after that, which apparently is a very prominent accolade to have in the industry.
The head baker was over the moon at this prospect that she can get everyone to chip in and bake even more pastries in a shorter time that way since they can just use the preset functions moving forward. She insisted that everyone needs to be trained, pass the test and get certified, else they will get penalized in their performance review.
However, many of them soon realized that it wasn’t that easy to be certified as it does require some baking knowledge, experience and even appreciation. This resulted in a few of them having to take up certain baking modules that were added as part of the entire “package” sold to the baker by the vendor. That’s not all, if they fail the test, they need to pay and retake the test again. The entire training, test preparation and certification took each of them 4 to 6 months at varying speed, depending on their appetite and aptitude to really learn all the modules and be able to pass the test.
During this time, things started to fall into pieces.
The head baker managed to pass the certification herself. So did her baking assistants. The cashier, servers and marketing person however struggled to cope while trying to do their current jobs as efficiently as possible.
As the baking assistants became very good with using the oven to churn out pastries, they also ran out of ingredients faster than usual but as they were so obsessed with using this new technology, they then asked the head baker to help with getting the ingredients faster so they can be loaded into the oven. Initially the head baker thought why not but soon she realizes it’s not practical as she, herself can also use the oven and she wants to be the chief designer to design new baking recipes to fully maximize the oven. Thus, she then delegated this task to the cashier, servers and marketing person to help instead, adding to their level of stress in trying to cope with yet another additional ask.
Eventually, it led to chaos as everyone was in the kitchen trying to prepare ingredients, use the oven and essentially be a baker, which was the vision sold by the supplier; no one was serving, taking orders, getting payment or promoting the bakery. Customers started complaining about this lack of attention as queues started forming not for pastries to be ready as they were all piling up in the kitchen but for them to be ready, packaged, displayed, served and to even make payment. Some of the bakes also became quite inconsistent in taste as it depended on the non bakers to prepare the original ingredient list when the assistant bakers were too held up baking. This led to bad reviews of the bakery for its service, poor maintenance of the shop front and inconsistent quality.
Yet, the head baker was still trying to recover the cost of investment on the oven and training modules as well as test modules to be able to hire more people to help. Worse, business became impacted and sales were dipping, which then led to unconsumed ingredients and pastries going bad. Frustrated, the bakery owner blamed the oven and decided to sell it; the supplier agreed but persuaded her to go for another newer model that has an added function of doing ingredient quantity forecasting to solve her problems instead. She was tempted yet again as she thought that was the cause of her problems.
This is not a piece about ovens, the baking industry or even pastries. It essentially is an observation I made while helping companies to review their MarTech stacks and/or implement their MarTech adoption process.
Just as not everyone is a Baker and should be a Baker in that story, not everyone should be required to use the tool in the exact same manner and level. There are job roles and expertise for a reason and a good one. Whoever is designated to maximize the use of it to benefit the rest of the company, should be your power users, your expert users and your most certified users. There should be different levels of users who should then be trained to use the tool differently so they can reap the most benefit out of the tool to in turn, benefit the rest of the company and your customers.
Remember, before you blame the tool, look instead at your original purpose, objectives and what you were trying to solve for with the tool.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally or Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.