As a CMO, if you’re living in a binary world of marketing, you’ll never find anything you didn’t expect. Digging into analytics leads to questions and insights, leading to even more questions, requiring further exploration of the data. While it can feel as though you’re getting nowhere, the reality is you’re getting smarter as you go, revealing insights that can change the direction of your marketing strategy for the better, leading to more data-inspired marketing, versus data-driven.

In this podcast, Jan-Eric Anderson, chief strategy officer, and Zack Pike, VP data strategy and marketing analytics at Callahan, discuss the differences between data-driven and data-inspired and why it’s important to lean toward being more data-inspired when it comes to marketing decisions.

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Welcome to Callahan’s Uncovering Aha! podcast. We talk about a range of topics for marketing decision-makers, with a special focus on how to uncover insights in data to drive brand strategy and inspire creativity. Featuring Zack Pike and Jan-Eric Anderson.

Jan-Eric:

Hi, this is Jan-Eric Anderson, chief strategy officer at Callahan.

Zack:

And this is Zack Pike, head of data at Callahan.

Jan-Eric:

All right, Zack, I’ve got a topic we were going to talk about today. I want to tee this up to you and this is getting some experience we’ve been having recently. The topic I want to talk about is the perception of the role that analytics can play and what role they can play for a company, for a corporation.

Zack:

Okay.

Jan-Eric:

I don’t think you would find very many companies that will sit there and say data isn’t important, but if you were to go and survey companies and ask them why are you using data? What is your expectation of data and data analytics in the marketing function? You would probably get a couple of different responses, types of responses you could probably categorize and categorize into a couple of things.

Zack:

Okay.

Jan-Eric:

This is what I think we would hear. One is that I expect it to tell me what’s right and wrong, a very binary view of yes or no, black or white on to validate an assumption, a hypothesis, whatever. The other option is that data is here to help me learn, to provide context, to provide information or deeper understanding around factors in business. Is that fair? These are probably generally the two types of expectations that clients would have for data.

Zack:

Yeah.

Jan-Eric:

Okay. Yeah, yeah. All right, so are there … How important is it to … I guess, is one better than another?

Zack:

I don’t think so. So the two lanes I am, it’s binary, it’s not binary, right? That’s the summary of the two ways. I think that that that is probably dependent on the decisions you’re making and the type of business that you’re making them against. We spend most of our time in the marketing space, and binary data driven decisions in the marketing space are really difficult, unless you’re in a really highly transactional e-commerce environment. It’s all digital marketing. It’s like a factory of leads coming in and purchasing on the website. It’s hard to have it be a binary decision, because … or binary data-driven decision, because customers are buying things in stores. They’re getting hit with channels from all over the place. They might be buying some online and some in store. The attribution path is very different.

Zack:

This reminds me of a podcast that I listened to. This is probably from a couple of years ago from Google, where they were talking about data-driven decisions versus data inspired decisions. I think that while most marketers, most business people would like to be on the data-driven side, where we spend most of our time is on the data-inspired side. It’s the less binary side.

Jan-Eric:

That data-driven thing, it gets back to the assumption that hey, if we have data analytics, it’s going to tell us right from wrong.

Zack:

Right.

Jan-Eric:

Now there are cases where it can be used for that.

Zack:

Absolutely.

Jan-Eric:

What are examples of that? I mean, I guess what goes through my head is that the place where data-driven is most … or this this binary view would be maybe on less significant or smaller, very tactical questions.

Zack:

Yep.

Jan-Eric:

Do people prefer the blue M&M or the red M&M, right?

Zack:

Yes.

Jan-Eric:

That is a binary type of thing. Not a lot of variables going into that type of a decision or that type of an analysis.

Zack:

That is a good way to describe it. The small tactical decisions, the binary world works really well, and that can be a lot of stuff. I mean that can get you pretty far. This is … Actually, as we’re talking, it’s reminding me of a podcast we did a while back where we talked about some of the frustrations CMOs have with data and analytics and their expectations around it. It’s reminding me a lot of that podcast, because in that one we talked about these longterm, big, sweeping changes and wanting to use data to drive the decision around that. That’s where it gets really difficult and much more hairy, right? It’s-

Jan-Eric:

Because you start doing analysis and this is where we get into the data inspired. You start looking at data and at information. Sometimes it just, it leads you to more questions, or oh, okay, I just learned one thing, but that just raises three more questions, which then requires further exploration along the way. You may start to feel like, man, we’re not getting anywhere. We’re not getting closer to a decision. The reality is you’re getting a lot smarter as you go. You’re being a lot more … You’re getting a lot more informed the further you get down the pack.

Zack:

I think part of it is just resetting the expectation, right? It’s, I have … So if I’m in a normal business, I have just any restaurant, a retailer, someone selling through a retailer, I need to be honest with myself about what I’m using data and analytics for. It’s what you just said, the tactical, minute, very micro decisions, I’m probably in a good binary environment. Stuff that I can test really quickly, measure those tests and make decisions and move on. But if I need to make big longterm changes to this company, to the way we operate, to the way our brand is perceived by the customer, to how we approach customers from a communications perspective, that’s where I have to be okay with saying, okay, binary decision, it’s out. It’s not part of this equation anymore.

Zack:

I’m going to take small, incremental steps to get smarter about the business over time and get smarter about this decision that I’m thinking I’m going to make. The way that we’ve done that is we go down the testing path, but it’s a little bit different of a lens into that testing path and it’s having the ability to be flexible about what you’re doing inside that test. I’m thinking of an example that we’re actually working through with a client right now, where we’re testing a very substantial change to the way that marketing has been executed in the past.

Zack:

It’s a massive departure from the way they’ve done it previously. We think it’s the right thing to do, but we’re … Listening to this podcast over time, you would know that we are big fans of putting our money where our mouth is and let’s actually test this theory. Through that test, we had an expectation on how we were going to measure it. It was actually fairly binary, right? We had a typical test to control setup. If the test group achieved a certain threshold above the control group, we were going to call it a success and we were going to move forward and everybody would be happy.

Zack:

But you get into this and you realize, oh geez, there’s some variables that we one, didn’t account for and two, probably couldn’t have accounted for in some cases. So if you’re doing your due diligence on the analysis and understanding side, you start to say, okay, well maybe I need to throw out my original measurement mechanism. This is becoming more of a data inspired decision. I’m using this test now to learn more than I knew before about the business and about this decision we’re thinking about making as I work my way through and navigate the waters of this test in a different way than I planned to in the past.

Jan-Eric:

What I’m hearing from you is that you’ve got to be … there’s a requirement for flexibility in data inspired in that example you were just giving, right? So the require