This is quite a long read – but worth the effort. One immediate stand-out for my world of driving eCommerce revenues:

3. How would your business change if you used big data for widespread, real-time customization?

Customer-facing companies have long used data to segment and target customers. Big data permits a major step beyond what until recently was considered state of the art, by making real-time personalization possible. A next-generation retailer will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from Internet click streams, update their preferences, and model their likely behavior in real time. They will then be able to recognize when customers are nearing a purchase decision and nudge the transaction to completion by bundling preferred products, offered with reward program savings. This real-time targeting, which would also leverage data from the retailer’s multitier membership rewards program, will increase purchases of higher-margin products by its most valuable customers.

I welcome the advent of the data-aware organisation that operates in a transparent set of market conditions. In this world, true leaders will be the ones who can read the context around the data.

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'tis the winter of our list content

The calendar flipped over to December this week, we got an inch of snow in London… and everything ground to a halt. Except for the compilers of end-of-year lists, who’ve swiftly moved to fill the breach.

Long term readers (yes, both of you) of Sandlines will know that I’m a bit of a music fan, so I’ve closely followed the ‘best albums of 2010′ lists in Q Magazine, NME and the like – and I’m looking forward to various others.

One things struck me, in particular, about the NME list: on their website, they link to the reviews of each album and publish the score (out of ten) of each title listed. The consistency between what they are saying now with their own reviews over the course of the year is astonishingly low.

MGMT’s sophomore effort, Celebration, managed only 6/10 upon release – but features at #19 in the end of year list… considerably higher than the much more favoured Dilinger Escape Plan which, despite being raved about with a 9/10 review, only managed to scrape in at #67.

So what’s behind this?

It reminds me of the discussion around the ‘Pepsi Challenge‘, as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Pepsi produced a product that, in blind tests, wiped the floor with market-leader Coke. They used this as the basis of a huge marketing campaign. Coke remained (by some distance) market leader. One of the reasons for this, suggested by Gladwell, is that the ‘sip test’ talked only to first impressions – and the sweeter Pepsi drink made a much better first impression. But over time, people found the sweetness cloyed.

Of course, another major factor is the power of brand identity and associations – one of the reasons why Stella Artois spent much of the past 30 years as market leading lager in the UK despite consistently doing poorly in blind taste tests.

So perhaps the lists reflect the more considered satisfaction with the music in question – and the power to last out the initial sugar rush. Certainly, NME’s choice for the top spot, the excellent ‘Hidden’ by These New Puritans signally lacks saccharine (excellent choice, by the way guys).

There’s a clear marketing lesson in there somewhere. But what I’m going to pull out is more direct: these lists make people buy. The Q list made me buy ‘Queen of Denmark’ by John Grant… an album that (assuming it’s not a ‘sip test’ reaction) is probably going to make my top 5 of the year.

PS – my others would be These New Puritans’ ‘Hidden’; Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’; The National’s ‘High Violet and ‘Total Life Forever’ by Foals.

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As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?

I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.

We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing.  For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).

Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.

So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?

Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.

But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.

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(from The Economist)

I saw some figures from Comscore today that put the global online audience at a little over one billion people – and showing China taking over from the US at the number 1 spot.

Seems a long time since we were arguing about whether online would ever make it to the position of being a significant part of the media mix for advertisers.

Sandlines is firmly of the view that 2009 will be a (comparatively) good year for digital marketers – in as much as everyone is hurting, we will hurt least, according to the latest Bellwether reports.

For me, the key to this is that marketers need to think in terms of the people they are marketing to: ie people not simply figures on a spreadsheet.

In other words:

• audience not ‘impressions’;
• individualised/targeted messaging (the right message to the right person at the right time);
• conversations that listen, not just ‘spray and pray’ broadcast.

The technical capabilities to do this are increasingly there, in our hands. Let’s use them! There’s a billion reasons out there to get it right.

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But one manifestation of my ‘geek’ (frankly I probably knock the 10% ceiling from time to time) is responding to surveys. I guess it stems from wanting to see what marketers are up to and what they’re asking.

Of course, the cynical view is that surveys will (should) always tell you what you want to hear – and a big contributory factor sits in the way the questions are asked. The link is to a result from Google Book Search, btw. There are any number of illustrations of this point if you ‘conduct a google search‘ to support this further.

But the survey I looked at tonight was a classic case of forcing the answer you want. I was being asked about my view of some sponsored web content. Before I looked at the content, I had to visit the site in question.

During the survey, I was asked if I had visited, enjoyed and would be likely to revisit the content. I’d visited three of the eight content areas… but I was unable to continue with the survey unless I ticked a box that said I’d visited it. I therefore had to lie to proceed.

This is not an uncommon issue: there’s a tendency in surveys to insist on answers to questions, and it is simply a question of the survey authors not thinking through the options.

Research does, of course, have substantial value… but please don’t take it at face value. Sometimes people are less than scruplously honest… and it’s not always their fault.

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