Marketing Tales From The C-Suite

Sunset to Sunrise Career Experience Sharing: Series 1 Episode 2

Data, Privacy & The Predicted Untimely Death of Personalisation

I don’t think I’ve met a marketing leader in the past decade who hasn’t been challenged by what I tend to refer to as the “Big Data Dichotomy”. Data has never been more plentiful, notionally easy to access with the potential to deliver exponential intelligence that can help you go faster, better, further at whatever it is you’re attempting to do… “If we could only just cope with the data overload, manage compliance and operationalise the intelligence!” In other words, it appears that over recent years a diametrically opposed situation has crystallised between the availability of previously un-imagined volumes of data and a disconnect on our ability as marketing leaders to leverage the implied opportunities that that data provides in many real-world organisations.

 I’m CMO for QUANTIQ an international tech consulting firm and have served on many leadership teams across multiple C-suites in both B2B and B2C organisations for more years than I’m going to admit. As part of this “Sunset to Sunrise” experience sharing series, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at this “Big Data Dichotomy” and unpack it a little. Let’s take a look at some of what I would consider to be the key components: -

• First Principle for Marketers of Digital Transformation; Big data and all that goes with it is an outcome of the paradigm changes in technology that we have seen in the past decade. This isn’t a tech piece so I’ll skip all the material on that which you can easily find elsewhere. Let’s just focus for a moment on the concept of “Digital Transformation” and its impact on how we all live and work.
• Digital Transformation is obviously being driven by tech innovation and that’s not going to slow down any time soon! But the evangelisation of “the art of the possible” should be owned by marketers. It’s us that should be best positioned to help our markets and customers understand the opportunity and to desire the means of how they can transform. I couldn’t agree more with Michael Brenner when he says, “Marketing should lead digital transformation” We are or should be the owners of the ‘customer experience’ which, although it has many contributing factors that vary from enterprise to enterprise, most if not all are now informed by connected intelligent tech. However, if we believe the Nielsen CMO Survey , 74% of CMOs have little confidence they have the right tech in place to achieve their goals. Now in a “digital first world” not having the right tech is a problem but is the cause due to our lack of influence as marketers in the C-Suite CAPEX decision making process or a lack of technical competence within the marketing function…or perhaps a bit of both? 
• First Principle for Marketers of Digital Transformation is therefore for any aspiring CMO or marketing leader; “Get Savvy with the Tech!” And I don’t just mean the Martech landscape. We all know there is a plethora of Marketing related workload applications and an equal number of enthusiastically priced agencies happy to advise you on them. However, the era of complex on premise legacy ERP platforms with multiple interfaces into such third-party specialist applications is dying. Ensure you get knowledgeable on modern cloud enabled AI informed enterprise platforms which have very definitely arrived, alongside low code agile application enablement platforms such as Microsoft Power Platform and Customer Insights. These are transforming the speed, cost and agility of connecting enterprise grade workflows regardless of existing IT architectures and making the perennial problem of how to operationalise data driven intelligence into day to day workloads near seamless. QED the era of the marketing leader who leaves the choice of tech to their CIO is also dead …. (if it ever should have existed) Being more “Tech Informed” will help springboard your relationship with your CIO peers and position you better to influence and lead the digital transformation strategy within your organisation. I would suggest it is now a compulsory skill set for any marketing leader.
• The Trouble with Compliance; is it’s non-negotiable and in many parts of the world materially tougher privacy laws such as the GDPR in Europe have made the old days of “customer opt out”, assuming you ever enjoyed them, look like the wild west. Many would say there is further to go, and we may well see more regulation with respect to certain types of data access and use such as for political campaigning. As we know penalties for getting it wrong are significant and with 80% of enterprises reporting problems with GDPR implementation it’s probably not surprising that 58% are failing to meet initial data request deadlines and that some headline fines have been levied against the likes of Google, British Airways and Marriot International. Gartner recently reported that by 2023 33% of Brand PR disasters will result in some form of data ethics problem.
• However, it could be argued convincingly that the bigger problem is more one of “Customer Trust”. With customers showing an increasing unwillingness to share their data. In the same report Gartner are predicting a 33% fall in influencer marketing by 2023 due to brands seeing reduced ROI from that investment type, arguably due to heightened cynicism and customer trust erosion.
• So, on the one hand data collection, management and processing capabilities have to be spot on to avoid compliance and data ethics pit falls whilst accessing the type of personal data that marketers use as the fuel to drive their businesses is becoming more difficult. However, does this support the prediction by Gartner that 80% of marketers are set to abandon personalisation by 2025?
• My observation is that there’s something that you can do about the first of these challenges and not much that can be done about the second, at least in the short term. Data collection, management, the leveraging of intelligence from that data and the deployment of that intelligence to facilitate personalisation, but a lot more besides, is all about Tech & Skills. You need the right technical solutions to ensure your data is seamlessly available and accessible equally to your BI engine and your operational enterprise workload applications. Plus, you need to have the right skills in your team to manage the required workflows. If you’re still running offline databases or siloed marketing applications with imports and exports of data between different parts of your enterprise, I suspect you may have different versions of the truth about almost anything depending on whether you’re in Sales, Finance, Operations or Marketing and when you cut the analysis. If I’m describing your world the good news is there really is a better way! See item 1 above and “Get Tech Savvy!” Start to drive digital transformation because if that really is your reality sooner or later someone else is going to eat your lunch.
•  Adapt Improvise & Overcome…Don’t Stop; OK I know the root of that quote is from Clint Eastwood but it’s one of my favourites! Marketing if it’s anything should have at its heart a creative engine, constantly looking at new and effective ideas and strategies to move your organisation forwards to achieve its goals. Back in the early 90’s I was one of the first to introduce high production selective binding and inkjet messaging to mail order catalogues in the UK. I’ve never had a problem with “Stealing with Pride” and copied the approach from successful US direct mail organisations. The challenge was more the commercial negotiation to get the print production house to invest the eight-figure sum to buy the necessary kit. The result would look positively “steam driven” in today’s online world but back then it was cutting edge and, in its way, transformative …we actually made money on multimillion run prospecting mailings for a period of time! Which for non-direct marketers reading this, that’s about as close as you get to the holy grail in DM.
• The point to the story is customers tend to disproportionately respond to the level of relevance that your offer has to them. The ideal offer at the ideal time presented in a personally appealing way normally wins out. I don’t see anything in todays world and in human psychology that suggests this principle has somehow changed in the past twenty-five years. Sure, our challenges are different, perhaps more technical, the tools more complex but our role as marketers is to find the right solutions, not to abandon one of the key principles of our trade. If you get Tech Savvy you will find the right solutions for your organisation. If you are imaginative about leveraging third party platforms, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Point Drive, particularly if you’re in the B2B space, where customers trust and share their data already and where you can leverage that knowledge in the background you can find a way to both comply with the data privacy landscape and not only continue but to thrive with your customer personalisation and offer construction. The task for us all as marketing leaders is to “adapt, improvise and overcome” … as it always has been!

This Sunset to Sunrise Career Experience Sharing Series is a commitment I made to a young marketeer recently to share my experience more widely and I am aiming to publish a couple of times a month. If you or someone you know has found this article useful then I’m delighted. If not, thank you for dropping by anyway. If you’re starting out on your marketing career and have a topic, you’d like me to discuss please reply and let me know and I will do so if I feel I have something of interest to share.

Ashley Gatehouse CMO QUANTIQ: International IT Consulting