InfoObesity, a term coined by Debra Bass, president of Johnson & Johnson, refers to how marketers are suffering from gorging on an inconsumable amount of data that is not just extremely complex but can quickly become dysfunctional.
Today, big data analytics has revolutionised the marketing landscape. Companies may have access to immeasurable amount of data, like a treasure trove of actionable insights, which can decide how the business should run.
But, just like how too many cooks spoil the broth, having too much data can easily go wrong.
A Boston Consulting Group report found that managers in the most complex organisations spent 30% to 60% of their time in meetings and the remaining 40% writing reports.
With all that time spent sorting out an immense amount of data, it’s unsurprising to learn that employees can only get 6.5 hours meaningful work done each week.
Does this mean that companies should start focusing less on being “data-driven” and return to its traditional “gut-feel” decision making approach?
The answer is not definite – in fact, it’s a process of trial and error until you find the balance.
Playing the data game: How to win
The belief of “more is better” does not always apply when it comes to data – if not cautious, you will find yourself facing data fatigue.
In many cases, the rapid rise in our ability to collect data has not been matched by our ability to support, filter and interpret the data.
To paint a picture, it is a similar problem to people complaining about city infrastructures in modern cities – the roads are too crowded, buildings are too saturated, traffic is bad etc.
Likewise, with huge amounts of data on hand, there must be an efficient data management structure in place to avoid chaos and to create meaningful applications.
A successful case in point would be the growth of Boost. As one of the nation’s first and largest e-wallets, there’s a huge amount of data at its disposal.
Introduced in 2017, the app started out as an empowerment tool for small businesses to go cashless. However, despite the high app install rate, it was difficult to retain long-term users.
After amassing a substantial user base, it had to figure out a way to use the data on hand to better understand user behaviour and why some discontinued using the app.
Working with digital agency ADA, Boost was able to systematically slice and dice the data it possessed, analysing users’ unique behaviour pattern and developing detailed targeting profiles.
Employing an acquisition strategy on a quarter-to-quarter basis, it was able re-gather data, break them down and perform retargeting.
As a result, after one year, Boost achieved a striking 2.8 million increase in users and 17x increment in gross transaction volume (GTV).
By targeting the right segments, ADA accelerated usage of the features and raised the GTV of RM3,000 a week to RM750K – that’s a 250x growth!
Why do businesses fail with data?
We often get enthralled by the sheer volume of data. The biggest limitation of data is that, without the right analysis, it is just a bunch of useless information.
Marketers and agencies often rely on poorly collected and analysed data, which can often lead to wrong decisions and kill good ideas.
When not used wisely, Big Data inundates business on a day-to-day basis.
Because of this, what businesses do with this huge amount of data is far more important than the amount of data itself.
A survey by NewVantage Partners found that:
- 72% of survey participants have yet to forge a data culture.
- 69% have not created a data-driven organisation.
- 53% are not yet treating data as a business asset.
- 52% are not competing on data and analytics.
These sobering results come in spite of increased investments in big data and AI initiatives over the years – which implies that many organisations are not even close to ready for the digital transformation that is already here.
Huge organisations have failed in the past during their digital transformational journey and there are many reasons why.
After all, it is not easy to build a data-driven culture. In response, we see the birth of hybrid organisations.
These organisations would establish innovation labs or departments led by data experts to drive results from their data investments.
This also became a challenge as the talent pool for skilled data scientists in Malaysia is still relatively small.
Having the technological tools to deploy big data alone is not enough; it is often the expertise and experience from these data scientists that make a difference.
Marrying innovation with tradition
Many organisations think “going digital” means having lots of digital assets on hand, but that is furthest from the truth.
More and more marketing dollars are shifting to digital advertising because of its inherent promise of effectiveness which is rooted in data. However, data-less digital advertising is like a ship sailing in the dark, where nobody notices.
Digital transformation is an ongoing process of changing the way you do business – it is multi-faceted and requires huge investment in retraining.
So, instead of focusing on acquiring more digital assets, it is important to choose what to ignore as well.
You cannot jump on the “disruptive technology” bandwagon just because everybody else is doing it.
Cancer is a major health problem in Indonesia and cases have grown by 130% in the past five years.
Kalbe, a leading pharmaceutical firm in that country, needed to reach out to a very non-digital savvy target market, including elderly patients with mobility issues.
In this case, popular marketing methods such as ads buy on social media will not work towards their goal.
Indonesia, as a country is unique because slow internet and high data costs have made SMS the preferred method of communication.
Trust your ‘gut’ vs data
Experience + innovation + information (data) are the three key components of a good business strategy. Over-reliance on any one of these can result in suboptimal results.
With all the numbers, percentages and lines of codes, turning to “data-driven” solutions will always seem like the answer.
Regardless, it’s also very important for decision makers to not forget about their intuition – their experience. After all, their vision was not formed out of numbers, it was from their belief in what is possible.
Between endless data and within the bell curve, there are outliers which can be explored.
Organisations must become more serious and creative about addressing the human side of data if they truly expect to harness meaningful business benefits.
In short, the human mind is very good at some things, but it also has its limitations. Vice versa, for the things we tend to be terrible at, we created computers to solve them for us.
A great creative idea inspired by data-driven consumers needs to backed by a data-driven guarantee of effectiveness.
As data-driven as an organisation can be, it would be a total flop if decisions are made solely based on algorithms.
A leader’s vision and gut feeling are nonetheless crucial to the business success. But if you can put those two things together, you will have much stronger and reliable predictions.
Similarly, inspiration and innovations are always rooted on gut and experiences – they are like rough diamonds – and data helps them shine and travel far, whilst producing results.
Anurag Gupta is the chief operating officer of ADA, part of the Axiata Group, which integrates data, insight, media and content to deliver business outcomes
