I hate to break it to you, but you don’t know your customers as well as you think you do. A marketer’s understanding of a customer is usually an ideal view pushed by the brand team — an aspirational view that everyone believes. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. You may even be able to spit out stats like average order value, or units per transaction, but that knowledge is narrow, the insights are few and the result is overconfident marketing built on a foundation of self-fulfilling, internal Kool-Aid drinking that completely misses connection and alignment with real customers. We have to break down that wall before we can move forward. It’s important to consider what you actually know to be fact and why you know it. It’s easy for a spouted statistic to become a brand commandment, or for a survey that provides a complete and holistic view of your customer to quickly become the concrete and unassailable truth. So how do you separate fact from fiction? Data accuracy Data warehousing is a hot-button topic right now, with brands making large investments as they play catch-up to their early-adopting peers or enhance data types. It’s an important step forward for marketing that was previously considered more art than science. Even so, capturing data isn’t enough because data is reliant on the lowest common denominator. Data is fragmented: Every type has different sources, capabilities and levels of sophistication. When data sources come together, the resulting pool is only as good as the weakest data source. Finding the baseline can be challenging, and it’s even harder considering each team is often pushing for different levels of sophistication. While some channel managers may be investing heavily in their areas, others may not be. It takes an honest internal view of […]

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Source:  MarTech Today