optimize your marketing mix
DESCRIPTION
Analytics, if done well, produces insights, but insights on their own produce nothing. USAA has integrated their analytics streams with their marketing strategy and execution streams. In this session Robert Wellborn presents insights and finding they learned on the way to integration. These include: aligning marketing with the bill payers; gaining the right sponsors; and structuring your organization to generate and consume insight.TRANSCRIPT
Optimizing Your Marketing MixA case study
May 1, 2014Robert WelbornAssociate Vice President, Decision ScientistUSAA@robert_welborn
Cautionary Tale• In 1949 Alexander Kotov was challenge by Tigran Petrosian (The Iron Tigran)
•Petrosian is the acknowledged Defensive Master, able to see 1,000’s of variations in play. He is the “hardest to defeat player in the history of chess”
• Kotov on the other hand was the chess rockstar. He hobnobbed with supermodels and nuclear physicists.
•This was Superman fighting The Incredible Hulk in the Soviet Chess world
•Petrosian surrendered in 13 moves
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Kotov Syndrome
• A Player, confronted by 1,000’s of possible scenarios
• The obvious is missed
• The player makes decisions based on emotion and expediency, instead of facts and discipline
Industrial Analysis requires Decision Frameworks not just Decision Making Tools
Analytics must produce Insights, not reports, and the Insights must be Useful (Results are better than elegance)
The Usefulness of the insights is a function of the integration of your analysts (not just your analysis)
Three Keys
Building Decision Frameworks (not just buy more tools)
Organize To Use Specialists
Start with the CFO
Publish for the C-suite
Source: Beleant, 2007 “Paleolithic Flints” used under Michigan Publishing Creative Commons http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.0005.006
When to Pay Attention to Analytics
The General Practitioner versus the Specialist
• When the GP says you are sick, you trust the GP to run some tests
• When the specialist says that you have Achilles tendonopathy, you go have surgery
•You want your analysts to be specialists
Source: Wikimedia Commons
So Who are The Specialists
The Threefold Path of Analysis
Ask someone
Experiment
Build a model
The CFO wants marketing to work
She may not know why
Or how it works
• Transform the CMO into a portfolio manager
• Analytics becomes the risk manager
Publish for the C-suiteConnect competitor action and macroeconomic analysis to your marketing
Allow real scenario analysis, "what if"
Get out of the PowerPoint trap and into white papers and long reads
Become the CEO's weekend reading
Source: Longreads.com
Analytics Must Produce Insights (Focus on Results)
• The Results should drive where you start, remain, and stop looking
• Converting Invested Money into Products is the kernel of every useful insight in Marketing
Insights must be useful
• The more useful the insights, the more credible your analysts are
• The more
http://blog.uber.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/New-Logo-Vertical-Dark.jpg
Conclusion
• Align your organization for using specialists, and set them up so that there is no punishment for telling the truth
• You need to hire the following specialists: Survey-ers, Experimenters, and Modelers
• Connect the stuff the CFO wants to what the CMO delivers and manage the risk
• Publish for the C-Suite and use your credibility
• When you are certain of something, do something
Questions?
Appendix
Alignment (or no one grades their own paper)
Keep the “Measure” separate from “Recommend” but using the same data
Separate Research from Analytics
Ask someone -
• Survey• Focus Group• Social or Listening
Experiment
• Test vs Control
• Multivariate
Separate the method of marketing from the method of measurement
Certainty in a measurement is not the same as certainty in results
Paid Search vs. Lift over control
Models
• Audiences
• Marketing Mix
• Funnel Analytics
“Art is a lie that helps you understand the truth. Models are abstractions that help you understand reality.” – Pablo Picasso