As businesses evolve, It’s time to revisit, re- imagine and re- invigorate our analytic strategy

Posted on April 17, 2024

Knowledgeable, experienced experts, and mavens are talking about a post-pandemic new normal, providing their best thoughts, research, experience, and examples from past economic calamities in identifying what’s ahead. Of course, no one knows for sure, but two topics that will certainly matter for businesses to evolve and adapt will be:

1. Changing buyer behavior, whether consumers or businesses.
2. How analytics and insight will be key to understanding and acting upon it.

Taking a Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Analytics Officer focus to driving strategy, Customer experience, Marketing...

Marketers have over decades built mechanisms to listen and respond to changing behaviors, and I expect those will continue especially with talented marketers realizing the sea changes occurring and the need to do so. But, for analytics, there is a unique opportunity to use this disruption and discontinuity to revisit, re-imagine, and re-invigorate the analytic strategy -- defining what, where, and how analytics will deliver outsized business value.

Analytics have been on a steep growth trajectory as most industries have adopted analytics to impact revenue or bottom-line results. On this trajectory, once an analytic program has been introduced, “more is better” becomes the informal mantra, and one that is hard to disagree with.

The challenge we now face is if doing more in a business-as-usual manner -- in areas where we’ve become expert such as optimizing a campaign or supply chain, etc. -- is where analytics will continue to provide the most value. Perhaps, focusing on strategic questions about customer behaviors and drivers, business continuity, scenario planning, and using analytics as an asset for customers may be new opportunities. In short, re-committing analytics with a sharp and renewed focus to emerging “new normal” business strategies:

• A focus on “Trusted Customer Relationships” (per the CMO Survey and others) which implies:A deeper focus and understanding of customer opportunity and value (LTV).
  More Account-Based Marketing approaches in B2B.
  Accelerating analytics that support the customer experience.
  
• Changing buyer needs (per McKinsey and others) whether B2C or B2B, implies:Greater broad-based insight development.
  Greater use of segmentation.
  More experimentation and testing.
  
• More analytics in the delivery of a product or service, including how our analytics can help our customers—whether consumers and businesses—overcome changes in their world. This has the added advantage of also bolstering trusted customer relationships.

Business-wide scenario planning, continuity planning, and addressing ad-hoc strategic topics.

To be sure, these aren’t necessarily new ideas, though they will garner increased attention and provide a window within a changing business to shift how analytics can matter. How will analytics adapt and pivot to be in alignment with a changing business? What will these new areas of focus mean for analytic strategy and teams?

• An even greater demand and reliance on analytics, used in even an even wider set of business situations, atop already-running analytic programs that are still needed, in some cases more than ever.
• A need to focus not on everything, but the right things.
• A clearly articulated analytic strategy that identifies where and how business value is delivered and aligned to the evolving business strategy and model.
• Creating capacity in new areas, especially those that are not encumbered with day-to-day analytic deliverables but open to large-scale broad learning.
• More agility in creating faster turnarounds, switching topics, and the need for more analytics at the point of decision-making.
• More leadership in defining analytics within the context of the changing strategy, and a clear demonstration of where and how value is created for internal stakeholders, Customers, and Partners.

Of course, we are still dealing in a world of unknowns, but we do know that focusing more in areas around customers and taking a mindset to not automatically just "pick-up where we left-off" is a prudent way forward. We need to seize this opportunity—the disruption---to revisit, re-imagine, and re-invigorate the analytic strategy as a key value driver in the emerging new business approaches. Let’s start our next analytic journey!