Marketing data analysis gets you closer to customers

Smart data analysis can be a major source of campaign insight and even competitive advantage for brands and advertisers. The customer data owned by a brand advertiser can reveal

• Exactly who buys a given product or service
• Detailed information about the characteristics of those buyers
• Which other products and services they buy
• Which product and service offers they find most attractive
• Which buyers buy more of certain types of products
• How you can find more buyers with the same characteristics

These data analysis techniques can be applied to all types of customer data – whether it’s for a retail business, an online business or a call centre based business. Insight from data analysis can be applied across a wide spectrum; from adding inspiration to a creative brief through to changing a company’s entire business strategy.

You may think the claim that data analysis can change the destiny of a business is rather grandiose. But I can can think of two examples of breakthrough data insight from the same category that ended up contributing millions in additional brand revenues.

Sainsbury’s  – Sainsbury’s agency AMV were tasked with increasing the then ailing retailer’s sales by £2.5bn over a three year period. A seemingly impossible challenge until viewed as a data question. The AMV team calculated that £2.5bn equated to £833m per year which in turn equated to £16m per week.  It still looked like a big number until the AMV team considered that Sainsbury’s handled 14m customer transactions per week.  Then the target equated to just £1.14 per transaction. The brief to increase sales by £833m per week could be redefined as increasing each existing transaction by just £1.14. Now the target not only looked attainable, but this data insight led to the idea that lots of small changes could make a big difference.  From this insight came the campaign idea that consumers should “Try something new today”. By asking customers to ‘try something new’ they were able to persuade customers to spend at extra £1.14 every time they shopped.

Tesco – The Tesco Clubcard is now legendary as both a customer loyalty card and a source of information about customers.  Up until the introduction of the loyalty card, many retailers didn’t know who their customers were. And if they didn’t know who they were it was difficult for them to gather the data that allowed them to understand individual customers better. With the Club Card this all changed. Tesco were able to develop individual data driven relationships with their customers.  They were able to understand customer needs better and in doing so they gained competitive advantage over their rivals.