Analysis Paralysis
Don't worry love, it happens to everybody.
Many marketers will tell you that their profession is all about understanding customers.
In the old days (last week), they’d throw most of their budgets towards trying to collect as much information as they could about their customers.
Technology changed all this. Today you can pull in information that shows you where your products were sold at a particular price, in a certain part of town, at a certain time and by certain till operators.
Marketers now have absolutely no excuses. They know everything there is to know about their customers. They probably know more about you than your mum does.
So why are a lot of campaigns still shit?
You could argue that they have too much information – all the data and still no idea.
I remember getting a brief that was close to 25 pages in length – not including the various appendices and attachments.
The contents had literally been cut and pasted from the research report. No clear proposition or even distilled insights. Just ream after ream of numbers, bar charts and a matrix. Bosh – there you go. Ideas by tomorrow please. Thanks.
I don’t blame the suit for the complete lack of value added to this job on their part (in fact I’ve come to expect nothing of value whatsoever from that side of the office). My own eyes glazed over before the end of the first page and I desperately wanted to cut, paste and forward the entire document into the bin.
Incredibly, this brief was seen as ‘watertight’. “It’s totally comprehensive”.
‘Course it is you fuckwit. It’s comprehensively incomprehensible.
Professor Tim Calkins of the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois argues that the marketing profession needs to become less preoccupied with gathering information and more concerned with translating insight into action.
And the key to getting this right is the marketing plan… but that’s another post.
