Key Themes from the Marketing Analytics and Data Science Conference

Several of us at GutCheck had the pleasure of attending the Marketing Analytics and Data Science (MADS) Conference on April 11-13th. Our attendees included Chief Executive Officer Matt Warta, Chief Product Officer Keith Johnson, Vice President of Marketing Lisa Whetstone, and Strategic Account Director Jamie Webster.

We all know there is no shortage of data, and the conference focused on how data can best be used for specific businesses purposes. Topics of conversation included what data to use, what to do with it, and in the end, how data can help your company achieve better bottom line results. During the variety of presentations we attended, including our own, we wanted to share a few key themes that lend insight into the current trends and status of our industry.

Optimizing Analytics Teams & Processes

Several presentations noted the importance of leveraging people in your organization to improve processes and the impact of your analytics teams. For example, some note that when building a team you have to include a variety of different people and data backgrounds to create better outcomes. Analytics teams need to be able to execute on business intelligence, analysis, and data science.

The field of analytics has also expanded to include marketers and product teams—specifically, to enable them to do the things that analysts often do for them. Further, improving the effectiveness and impact of analytics teams is about sharing and talking about data across an organization to pull out the trends and insights and apply technology and methods that help solve problems.

Becoming Even More Data-Driven

Unsurprisingly, a lot of discussion during this conference was also about becoming even more data-driven—specifically, becoming data-driven when it comes to increasing the personalization of products and marketing activities. One presentation noted that current voice of the customer (VoC) research leaves a gap between a brand’s reality and the customer’s reality. Traditional personalization is based on transactions, personas, and implicit data. A new approach to capturing the VoC entails getting consumers to self-define their segments.

Becoming more data-driven is also about being able to combine more types of data in order to increase audience understanding. For example, we presented on how to bridge the gap between strategy and activation through the use of survey data and big data. So while we have access to more data than ever before, and this can be challenging, our industry of market research and analytics is expanding and creating new solutions to make big data actionable. 

To view the presentation we presented at the MADS conference, and how we are combining survey data and big data to increase audience intelligence, watch the webinar version of it below. You’ll learn about:

1. Why we need to be able to better identify audiences in a dynamic agile way
2. What tools and processes we have at our disposal to do this, and why a lot of them aren’t up to par
3. How our process works, including a case study on the yogurt category that highlights how we approach audience intelligence