I was speaking with a business associate last week who was recounting what she heard at a recent marketing conference. She mentioned that a lot of questions for the speakers had to do with the challenge of how to make “insights actionable”.
The last couple of years, the field of business analytics has been ultra-focused on “consumer insights”; the art of understanding consumers at a level which reveals the underlying motivations behind purchasing decisions.
A lot of products and services have come to market and report to deliver “insights”. However, even with the best tools now in hand, the process of applying these insights to real business problems is often no easier.
A Market Research Consultant’s Secret
How do market research consultants make insights actionable? Marketing professionals spend so much time, money, and effort to create a data flow, but so often don’t know what to do with it. And, in many cases, if you’re asking these questions once the data has been gathered and reported, than you may be too late.
This article is the first in a series of three that will explore how to measure marketing results from the angle of making facts and insights actionable.
The secret to making insights actionable is in how your organize the data collection process.
Often the task at hand is really, “how to measure strategy” and strategy starts with the deconstruction of things. All business data can be grouped into two categories that together define any business strategy.
- Results – or that which we’re trying to impact or change (i.e., call volume, sales, coupon redemption, loyalty, revenue, widgets produced, etc.)
- Delivery – or that which impacts the things we want to change (i.e., staffing, packaging, marketing, price, etc.)
So we have information that is “results” and information that is “delivery” by nature. If you were a statistician you’d call these dependent and independent variables. Another way to look at these are as cause (delivery) and affect (results).
When your information is organized in these two categories you’ll find that you’ve laid the foundation for converting data into actionable insights. Next week I’ll write about this process further and suggest some methods for organizing and reporting on the resulting data.
I’ll wrap up this mini-series with a set of case studies on how how others have tackled the question of how to measure marketing results and made insights actionable.
What do you think? Do you organize your data with the end in mind? Use the comment area below to tell us your technique or ask a question.
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Tags: How To Measure Marketing Results, How To Measure Strategy, Market Research Consultants
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