Are We Collecting the Right Data Only To Use it All Wrong?
You're training hard for your next fight, working out, evaluating your opponent's weaknesses and honing that strategic advantage that's going to take that opponent down.
But you're not an MMA fighter. You're marketing a product or service. You're collecting as much data as you can about your customers? You're analyzing and strategizing and trying to figure out how you can undermine your opponent.
Think your opponent is your top competitor? Not a chance. If you're like most of us today, you've positioned your target audience, the customer as your opponent. They're the ones you're looking to conquer.
They're the ones you use big data to manipulate. They're the ones that you study to know their next move before they know it. All with the goal of selling them more, even more than they need. At the end of the day, it's all about revenues.
And for many of us, this is all we know.
But perhaps it's time to rethink big data and our 20th century sales and marketing mindset that we think we've escaped. Even those of us how were still in high school in the 80's & 90's haven't let it go.
With all of this new information at our fingertips, maybe it's finally time to meet and exceed all of our objectives by using data in a new and innovative way that does not treat customers as an opponent but as an ally, and a force greater than we alone as marketing teams, could ever be, an army of promoters.
Are we afraid of that kind of success?
I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which a phenomenal author, Niraj Dawar, pointed out a truth that many of us are beginning to realize: "Winning the next transaction (through big data) eventually yields only short term tactical advantage, and it overlooks one big and inevitable outcome."
That outcome, Niraj explains, is that our real competitors in the industry are doing the same thing. This means that we and our competitors( the real ones) are burning through most of our analytics budget just to stay even with