Being a marketer means having a love-hate relationship with data.
I love the way data helps us better understand what the hell our brands really are and how they stack up against competitors. I love the way data can tell us what’s going on in the heads of our consumers.
Data helps us formulate the right strategies to create the right target-facing articulations of those strategies, without which we’d be making art or art’s sake instead of intelligent, focused art, and for that reason alone I would bow down at the data throne.
But as someone responsible for creating the communications that will best engage with and convince consumers, I’ve spent a lifetime ruing the potentially damaging effect data can have on a powerful (and usually therefore polarizing) piece of communication. As well as the hold it can have on tentative clients; smart people who can get freaked out by what’s at stake, and use data as a crutch to take the road most travelled and fall back on safer (and usually less engaging and convincing) executions.
I’ve always tried to treat data as the two-faced friend in high school who I never allowed out of the corner of my eye. Helpful with schoolwork, great to have in a nonsensical conversation, full of the kind of gossip and information that would make me think, “I never would have thought of that myself.”
But also talking about me behind my back. Telling people things about me that they may have interpreted incorrectly or stretched into truths that didn’t really exist. Being wary. Very wary…
If only we employed data just for fun/goofy purposes, using wonderful facts and figures for daily conversation fodder, like the recent stats on Facebook relationships (sad to see seven million more people becoming single vs getting married).
But as long as there are products to brand and sell, there will be data.
So go ahead, crunch the numbers, hug them, smother them with affection. But just in case, remember to keep your friends close, and your data closer.
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