Last week when we raised a question about organisations suffering from the Data Rich Insight Poor (DRIP) syndrome, we received a lot of feedback from our readers. Some of them asked questions about how organisations can find out if they suffer from an insight deficiency and a data surplus. This article attempts to put that in perspective.
Data and cultureWhile it’s a no-brainer that data and insights go hand in hand, experts say that organisational culture plays a huge role in how organisations can massage the data to work in their favour. For example, companies in the West such as eBay, Amazon or Google possess an organisational culture that motivates all employees to use data for decision-making. “In India, it is doubtful that this sort of culture permeates organisations,” says S Bharadhwaj, the Dr Bala V and Vasantha Balachandran Chair Professor of Marketing, Director (Research) at Great Lakes Institute of Management.
Shireesh Joshi, head - strategic marketing, Godrej Group, says that it’s a bit like conducting R&D within the marketing function. “You need an experimental entrepreneurial culture where there is someone mucking around in the data and identifying some of these patterns. You have to do it on faith, and staff it right and support it right for it to generate something, much like any other R&D,” he says. The people working on it need to be able generate hypothesis and imagine connections to be able to uncover patterns, like the famous case of retailer Target identifying pregnancy in a high school student even before her father did. “You also need good-quality data. So your input systems need to be impeccable. And of course you obviously need machines fast enough to crunch the volumes of data you need to. And once you find that first insight that gets you new revenue, that faith becomes religion,” says Joshi.
Bharadhwaj points out to some early signs that can identify that an organisation suffers from DRIP. Some warning signs may be the obvious ones – than an organisation has access to lots of data but rarely uses them for decision-making. He explains that organisations could do a simple test to find out if they are at risk. If a company has X amount of data in 2015, and it has 2X in 2016, and finds that the decision-making process is pretty much the same in 2016 and the decision quality has not improved, then it means that it is not utilising the data well enough or is collecting the wrong kind of data. Joshi agrees. “If you have lots of data about your business but your actions based on analysis of that is not driving up revenue or reducing costs then you have a DRIP problem.” Of course, no company can say that it does not have enough data points. “There is data everywhere, not just in transactions,” says Joshi, and adds that data can be found in incoming calls to company’s service numbers, in online comments and consumer behaviour. “If you haven't investigated those then you have more basic DRIP problem,” he says.
Any organisation that is obsessed with just one arm of the data stream is getting into the DRIP syndrome. “Obsession with just the sales numbers or with the consumer panel data will take you down the DRIP path,” says MG Ambi Parameswaran, executive director, FCB Ulka advertising.
Sometimes it takes simple steps like getting your marketing teams to sit together to avoid getting into this trap. Unfortunately, teams do not sit together for weeks together because of reasons ranging from travel and regional meetings to dealer meetings, consumer groups and activation plans.
“The marketing team has also become very large in companies. Add to this the growing number of specialist communication agencies to brief and debrief. Forget insight, sometimes even the data stays in silos for months,” says Parameswaran. He points out that some of the smarter companies are implementing a process of pooling all resources together to ensure that the various arms of the data octopus speak to each other.
While actions like creating a Consumer Insights Head have been tried out, these have an inherent danger of becoming a staff function and getting clubbed as a part of the market research team. Like most good actions even this would need to be driven from the top. Parameswaran says, “The path to insight rich life has to be driven from the top. In the better companies the CEOs are themselves involved in bringing all the teams together. That is a good place to start.”