By nickjohnson - July 24th, 2013
Rachel Hall from Honda has written a very interesting critique of the current drive towards data-driven marketing, over at the DMA Blog.
We’ll have all heard the Gartner statistic by now - “By 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO”. Many ‘thought leaders’ use this as evidence of a need for marketers to invest heavily in big data, social media analytics and other IT-based marketing solutions.
And yet in our own findings, this primacy of big data within marketing departments is an illusion. As I write here, big data is far further down the corporate marketing priority list than customer-centricity, multi-channel and measurement.
Hall goes further, and suggests a path for the informed marketer to follow when deciding whether IT and technology is the answer to your marketing problems:
1) Know your problem: Because it might not be solved by a new IT solution.
2) Have a roadmap: Basically, plan ahead. Don’t buy an IT solution that won’t scale with your brand
3) Is your organisation ready?: There’s no point driving towards new IT solutions if you don’t have internal capacity or interest in using them
4) Off the shelf doesn’t mean one size fits all: Make sure you build a bespoke solution. What matters to you doesn’t match up with what matters to others.
You can read more of Rachel’s advice here. And you can get more detail on our research on big data in our Marketing Primer, here.