January 31, 2013
BrainTrust Query: How Can Companies Go From Fractured Insights to Holistic Understanding?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of an article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research blog.
In larger companies, specialized insight functions may differ based on the necessity of satisfying the decision-making needs of different stakeholders. But problems commonly occur when they are not in alignment.
In an interview with Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research, Alec Maki, VP of BehaviorLens Research at InsightsNow, noted that shopper insights may serve category managers, consumer insights may serve brands, and product insights may serve R&D.
"Each insight function has a mission to break the customer into pieces that each owns and fiercely protects," he said. "But when marketing teams try to stitch the pieces into a whole, the resulting view of the customer is often incoherent and incomplete. Instead of a deep, empathetic, human picture, we get an image of something slapped strangely together — more akin to what you might see in a low-budget zombie movie."
He added, "In other words, insight functions are functionally driven to dehumanize the customer experience."
What is structurally wrong is that the foundation of customer understanding has been fractured through specialization, he argues. Brands may have experts in consumer research and shopper research but rarely do they understand each other’s perspective. Digital might be foreign to both. Those who manage syndicated sales tracking data, like Nielsen, IRI, or NPD, are yet another specialty. Media companies may also see splits between "traditional" and "new" media research.
"Marketing teams are also to blame," said Mr. Maki. "They think of consumers and don’t care about the 99 percent of their day that is involved with other products, services, and daily choices. We need to think of people as humans and holistically see their daily needs, concerns, and situations or we will be stuck with incremental thinking. In the real world, the end customer is the shopper is the person viewing the ad is the person collecting the coupon is the person posting to Pinterest. It’s the same person."
First, Mr. Maki recommends that a brand’s leaders must galvanize cross-functional insight teams, which he described as a "difficult" proposition. Second, companies must move from a fractured view of the customer to a single shared view.
"I liken this to a canvas and with each insight function being a painter — working together to paint a vibrant mural of customer understanding," said Mr. Maki. "To do this, we need common information frameworks to provide the lens from which to view the customer."
He concluded, "This type of approach provides cross-functional teams with a common, actionable view of the market. Within and across initiatives, teams can execute using the same lens of the customer, ensuring a consistent frame of reference for decision-making."
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Is there a clash between the different insight requirements across specialized departments at retail? How should such conflicts around varied insights be resolved?
Poll
Some companies have added a C-level executive that focuses on the customer experience across the entire organization, which may be where a lot of retailers may want to be headed. Marketing needs to know what Merchandising, Store Operations and other teams are doing and vice versa.
There are so many new solutions and technologies out there to help eliminate the silos between different business teams within an organization. It’s time for companies—from the top down—to embrace this ability and act on it.
There is definitely a ‘fractured fairytale’ view of “our customer” across different departmental factions at retail. Each department has a particular objective and are measured internally as to how, when and if they achieve they’re objectives. This is a much easier approach to manage but falls far short of the reality put forth by Mr. Maki.
It is imperative that retailers and brands assemble a cross-functional team that can collaborate to identify, understand and define each of their primary customer segments and create a clear and concise portfolio of each from THEIR point of reference. How each of these segments use communication devices, what medium and through which channel do they allow you to communication relevantly and personally with them is paramount. Once you achieve this holistic PoV you can then design and implement a truly viable omni-channel communication workflow with your true customers. Your success can then be measured by the ongoing ‘share-of-wallet’.
All specialized departments are making fragmented discoveries about consumers. Compelling insight requirements are not in what we do—we are all doing some good things—but what we understand. And our understanding must become a single shared view of each customer.
Resolution of this situation begins with a company’s clarity on what it ultimately expects from everyone.
Many great observations and I know from experience that this fragmentation is rife.
A couple of builds:
A single insight leader is needed. I mean a leader. Insight mustn’t be a support function and hidden in an existing silo.
Don’t get blinded by “clever analytics.” Too often I hear businesses talk about how great their insight is, but described in terms of the number of PhDs they have! I would prefer to hear the outcomes (and not just evidence of good pockets of insight).
Left without an organizing discipline, each department will naturally look at a goal based on what makes the best use of their core talents. As the article points out, this is definitely not the holistic view that the customer takes. To overcome this is something that sounds easy, but requires incredible discipline, namely start with the customer and work backwards through the various contributions of each department.
First you must learn what makes a difference to the customer. While this sounds obvious, many of the retailers I’ve dealt with come to these conclusions without ever asking a customer. The second part is the hardest and that is the incredible discipline to edit the response to only work on those things that are important to the customer, whether the corporate office agrees or not.
The best summation of this organizing principle is a statement made by Steve Temares at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. He said “we view the corporate office as a support function for the sales floor.”
Absolutely there is a clash between the insights traditionally requested by different departments in a retail organization. Sometimes the differences are important—merchandise trends in order to ensure the appropriate inventory levels, for example. But at other times the differences in insights serve the organization badly.
The place where these differences are highlighted is in the customer experience. We have all had the experience of dealing with different departments in a retailer (customer service, operations, finance) and finding that none of them are concerned about our experience as consumers; rather they are concerned about achieving their own metrics.
For retailers to achieve their goals of increasing profitable customer loyalty over time, all departments must have similar metrics and a concern about how their activities impact the customer experience. In addition, the best organizations have recently put in place leaders responsible for stitching together the different departments to ensure that the customer experience for different segments of customers is maximized.
Making sure there is a clear vision and that everyone is working toward the same goal is the role of the Chief Executive. The Board sets the goals and the CEO sees that they are achieved. Critical to making this happen is the establishment of cross functional quantitative measures that clearly identify success or failure.
A combination of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs and Tactical Performance Indicators (TPIs) is necessary. The KPIs spread across functional areas and allow participants to see the big picture. TPIs are within an individual worker or department’s span of control and allow them to monitor their own performance. The results are measurable outcomes that build team cohesion and inspire success.
I’m always amazed at the number of retail executives who don’t shop in their own stores. I once had a consult with a department store that said its key customer was a family with small children—yet there were no shopping carts. Apparently they didn’t know that parents of toddlers need a cart. Get into the store, and work as a team.
One aspect of these conflicts that will begin to help resolve them is the fact that the supplier insights also need to be coordinated with the retailer’s. The different departments/functions of the retailer will see and hear a single view of consumer insights when collaboration with the CPG company is optimized.
The retail organization needs to use insights about shopper segments to set broad corporate strategies that span the retail business functions. Share insights with trading partners to collaborate on marketing and merchandising efforts. Fuel decisions throughout the entire business planning lifecycle with shopper analytics using effective tools available today.
What is largely lacking in the industry is a global/universal perspective of humans and their behavior. Near one end of the scale are history, sociology and the economic laws (for example, the division of labor) which has created the business world we live in today. On the other end of the scale there are the minute sub-second processes that go on in a single shopper’s mind, when purchasing a single item, on a single occasion, in that universe.
Millions of stores world-wide, billions of shoppers, create a lot of datapoints for understanding the crowd of shoppers. The commercially useful understanding involves, for the individual manager, what is usually a tiny slice of this. Most managers, companies and industries are basically operating on their “received wisdom.” Not many are like Arie deGeus of Royal Dutch Shell, in his “Living Company,” and are striving for an accurate global view. The urgency of this is great in the retail world as “The Third Wave of Retail” is sweeping over us.
This is a significantly important insight from Joel and I can’t give a loud enough “AMEN!” What was frustrating this morning was to urgently want to respond at the same time I lost internet connection. But I’m back!
“It’s the ALIGNMENT stupid!” Alignment is the secrete sauce of corporate success and yet the most avoided issue in the system’s dynamic. In my view the most critical role of any leader is: To align all the organization’s energy toward its highest possibilities.
When you have departments, functions or programs all working in their own little world you cannot but fail. Even if you have a less than inspiring vision if there is alignment behind it you will succeed. If only our Government would understand this simple principle.
Let me take this a step further and talk briefly about the relationship between alignment and energy. “Energy” comes from everything in the universe. So in a retail shop ‘energy’ is emitted from everything from parking to policies to displays to inventory to human performance. The trick is to ensure, first, that these energies are positive and appealing energy; and second, that you align ALL these sources of energy toward your desired possibility. What ‘possibilities’ you aim that energy at is another discussion I hope we get into some day.
I’ll end with my favorite Einstein quote: “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” Identifying those frequencies is what alignment is all about!
It is interesting that the discussion is focusing on insights teams working at cross purposes. This is but a symptom, the underlying issue is that different departments have different goals. This causes support organizations, like insights teams, to pursue activities that do not necessarily coalesce. Insight teams are support organizations that take their direction and lead from the organizations that they support.
Many brands are starting to centralize these functions within the company. This allows the creation of a cohesive framework for insights projects to follow. This framework will allow results generated for different purposes to be stitched together to form a more robust view of the consumer. However, different departments will continue to have different needs, which will continue to mandate different drivers for insights exercises and the need to stitch results together.
Without clear ownership of the customer, yes, there are clashes across departments. These departments still need their unique insights in order to do their jobs. When it comes to marketing and the whole customer experience, decisions and strategies need to come from one source. The one committed to the customer.
As correctly pointed out in the article, the end customer is the shopper, the person viewing the ad, the person collecting the coupon, the person posting to Pinterest. It’s the same person. The challenge with this data is to connect the dots not collected by retailers, or if collected, lies in disparate systems seldom enabling a link to customers across channels and media.
What companies need is a customer analytics platform which at its foundation captures all the base attributes of the customer, like name, demographic parameters, social media IDs and others. Then link this with analytical attributes for the customer, e.g. what is the most common trip type to the store, and frequency of visit. These analytical parameters are derived by linking internal data with customer data. Similarly linking market data can give a whole new insight about the customer.
Linking customers across channels is not an easy task. Technologically savvy retailers today are leveraging sophisticated algorithms to derive the link.
Once the customer foundation is in place, companies can ingrain “customer” at the centre of all processes.
Of course there is a clash between different departments and their insight requirements—at least at most retailers. I’ll echo and expand on what Matthew Keylock refers to as one essential requirement: leadership. But leadership is more than an insights leader, rather it goes to the broader retail enterprise and starts at the top. Planning, executing and decision-making require data and insights.
Ideally these insights are centered around the business strategy. And based on our work and evidence that supports retail growth, those insights are denominated in customers, sales and margins.
There is no question that these conflicts exist and that they pose a significant problem. We are in an era where we have more available data than ever about consumer behavior but that behavior is also more complex than ever, due to the proliferation of channels and touch points. Leading retailers are taking steps to integrate their customer experience and the insight functions that support the design and execution of that experience also need to be integrated.
Insights are the raw materials of a story. A good story reveals the hows and whys behind a characters actions toward a particular goal.
A well-constructed story will help your audience of stakeholders like Category Managers, Brands, R&D, and folks who care about service innovation and interaction design, come up with their own insights around the characters in your play as their lives intersect with your brand.
Insights drawn from customer insights are where innovation comes from. That’s a whole different set of skills (as we all know.)
This story reminded me of a quote from Einstein: “Fish will be the last to discover water.” And while other industries may have embraced ‘customer centered design’ methods because of scarcity—the really good news is that once we make the connection, we will find ourselves swimming in an ocean of possibilities. Managing this process is the problem called out in this prescient article.
The storytelling concept is key and worth a look—it’s been the topic de jure at insights conferences. So one more quote: “Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.” John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
One more extra credit quote: A paradigm shift is when previous scarcities become abundances creating new scarcities – something like that – from George Gilder. My point: Once we discover that we are swimming in insights, we’ll have some management problems dealing with the abundances.
There are always specialized insights in areas such as supply chain, operations, employees, and customers to drive the individual silo’s metrics. At the end of the day for retailers, what all these metrics are designed to do is to drive sales and customer satisfaction.
The rise of a Customer Experience or Chief Customer Officer that can pull together the cross function teams will be key for retailers to resolve the different insight requirements, and what actions are being driven by those insights.
As with any large organization, it is natural that there be clashes, or at least points of creative tension, across departments. In retail in particular, for example, an issue that one of our customers has reported relates to the sharing of pricing insights across departments: how much, what types, what level of granularity, what frequency, and so on.
In terms of resolution, in our case we assist our customers in resolving these tensions by making our services as flexible as possible, to cater to the full set of internal customers with the specific reporting and insights that they need.
First off, thanks for the great commentary on my interview with Joel. Some thoughts on best practices emergent from the discussion:
– Leadership & vision
– True customer ownership
– Universal understanding of humans and their behavior
– Alignment across the organization
– Linking/integration of disparate data—perhaps via a customer analytic platform
Bringing this all together, we need 1) customer stewardship empowered to align the organization around the customer experience and 2) integrate a multi-faceted view of the customer 3) using a customer analytic platform that 4) leverages a common framework of human (behavior) understanding.
Easier said than done. However, it does give us a vision of what to shoot for in a world of ever-growing complexity.
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Some companies have added a C-level executive that focuses on the customer experience across the entire organization, which may be where a lot of retailers may want to be headed. Marketing needs to know what Merchandising, Store Operations and other teams are doing and vice versa.
There are so many new solutions and technologies out there to help eliminate the silos between different business teams within an organization. It’s time for companies—from the top down—to embrace this ability and act on it.
There is definitely a ‘fractured fairytale’ view of “our customer” across different departmental factions at retail. Each department has a particular objective and are measured internally as to how, when and if they achieve they’re objectives. This is a much easier approach to manage but falls far short of the reality put forth by Mr. Maki.
It is imperative that retailers and brands assemble a cross-functional team that can collaborate to identify, understand and define each of their primary customer segments and create a clear and concise portfolio of each from THEIR point of reference. How each of these segments use communication devices, what medium and through which channel do they allow you to communication relevantly and personally with them is paramount. Once you achieve this holistic PoV you can then design and implement a truly viable omni-channel communication workflow with your true customers. Your success can then be measured by the ongoing ‘share-of-wallet’.
All specialized departments are making fragmented discoveries about consumers. Compelling insight requirements are not in what we do—we are all doing some good things—but what we understand. And our understanding must become a single shared view of each customer.
Resolution of this situation begins with a company’s clarity on what it ultimately expects from everyone.
Many great observations and I know from experience that this fragmentation is rife.
A couple of builds:
A single insight leader is needed. I mean a leader. Insight mustn’t be a support function and hidden in an existing silo.
Don’t get blinded by “clever analytics.” Too often I hear businesses talk about how great their insight is, but described in terms of the number of PhDs they have! I would prefer to hear the outcomes (and not just evidence of good pockets of insight).
Left without an organizing discipline, each department will naturally look at a goal based on what makes the best use of their core talents. As the article points out, this is definitely not the holistic view that the customer takes. To overcome this is something that sounds easy, but requires incredible discipline, namely start with the customer and work backwards through the various contributions of each department.
First you must learn what makes a difference to the customer. While this sounds obvious, many of the retailers I’ve dealt with come to these conclusions without ever asking a customer. The second part is the hardest and that is the incredible discipline to edit the response to only work on those things that are important to the customer, whether the corporate office agrees or not.
The best summation of this organizing principle is a statement made by Steve Temares at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. He said “we view the corporate office as a support function for the sales floor.”
Absolutely there is a clash between the insights traditionally requested by different departments in a retail organization. Sometimes the differences are important—merchandise trends in order to ensure the appropriate inventory levels, for example. But at other times the differences in insights serve the organization badly.
The place where these differences are highlighted is in the customer experience. We have all had the experience of dealing with different departments in a retailer (customer service, operations, finance) and finding that none of them are concerned about our experience as consumers; rather they are concerned about achieving their own metrics.
For retailers to achieve their goals of increasing profitable customer loyalty over time, all departments must have similar metrics and a concern about how their activities impact the customer experience. In addition, the best organizations have recently put in place leaders responsible for stitching together the different departments to ensure that the customer experience for different segments of customers is maximized.
Making sure there is a clear vision and that everyone is working toward the same goal is the role of the Chief Executive. The Board sets the goals and the CEO sees that they are achieved. Critical to making this happen is the establishment of cross functional quantitative measures that clearly identify success or failure.
A combination of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs and Tactical Performance Indicators (TPIs) is necessary. The KPIs spread across functional areas and allow participants to see the big picture. TPIs are within an individual worker or department’s span of control and allow them to monitor their own performance. The results are measurable outcomes that build team cohesion and inspire success.
I’m always amazed at the number of retail executives who don’t shop in their own stores. I once had a consult with a department store that said its key customer was a family with small children—yet there were no shopping carts. Apparently they didn’t know that parents of toddlers need a cart. Get into the store, and work as a team.
One aspect of these conflicts that will begin to help resolve them is the fact that the supplier insights also need to be coordinated with the retailer’s. The different departments/functions of the retailer will see and hear a single view of consumer insights when collaboration with the CPG company is optimized.
The retail organization needs to use insights about shopper segments to set broad corporate strategies that span the retail business functions. Share insights with trading partners to collaborate on marketing and merchandising efforts. Fuel decisions throughout the entire business planning lifecycle with shopper analytics using effective tools available today.
What is largely lacking in the industry is a global/universal perspective of humans and their behavior. Near one end of the scale are history, sociology and the economic laws (for example, the division of labor) which has created the business world we live in today. On the other end of the scale there are the minute sub-second processes that go on in a single shopper’s mind, when purchasing a single item, on a single occasion, in that universe.
Millions of stores world-wide, billions of shoppers, create a lot of datapoints for understanding the crowd of shoppers. The commercially useful understanding involves, for the individual manager, what is usually a tiny slice of this. Most managers, companies and industries are basically operating on their “received wisdom.” Not many are like Arie deGeus of Royal Dutch Shell, in his “Living Company,” and are striving for an accurate global view. The urgency of this is great in the retail world as “The Third Wave of Retail” is sweeping over us.
This is a significantly important insight from Joel and I can’t give a loud enough “AMEN!” What was frustrating this morning was to urgently want to respond at the same time I lost internet connection. But I’m back!
“It’s the ALIGNMENT stupid!” Alignment is the secrete sauce of corporate success and yet the most avoided issue in the system’s dynamic. In my view the most critical role of any leader is: To align all the organization’s energy toward its highest possibilities.
When you have departments, functions or programs all working in their own little world you cannot but fail. Even if you have a less than inspiring vision if there is alignment behind it you will succeed. If only our Government would understand this simple principle.
Let me take this a step further and talk briefly about the relationship between alignment and energy. “Energy” comes from everything in the universe. So in a retail shop ‘energy’ is emitted from everything from parking to policies to displays to inventory to human performance. The trick is to ensure, first, that these energies are positive and appealing energy; and second, that you align ALL these sources of energy toward your desired possibility. What ‘possibilities’ you aim that energy at is another discussion I hope we get into some day.
I’ll end with my favorite Einstein quote: “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” Identifying those frequencies is what alignment is all about!
It is interesting that the discussion is focusing on insights teams working at cross purposes. This is but a symptom, the underlying issue is that different departments have different goals. This causes support organizations, like insights teams, to pursue activities that do not necessarily coalesce. Insight teams are support organizations that take their direction and lead from the organizations that they support.
Many brands are starting to centralize these functions within the company. This allows the creation of a cohesive framework for insights projects to follow. This framework will allow results generated for different purposes to be stitched together to form a more robust view of the consumer. However, different departments will continue to have different needs, which will continue to mandate different drivers for insights exercises and the need to stitch results together.
Without clear ownership of the customer, yes, there are clashes across departments. These departments still need their unique insights in order to do their jobs. When it comes to marketing and the whole customer experience, decisions and strategies need to come from one source. The one committed to the customer.
As correctly pointed out in the article, the end customer is the shopper, the person viewing the ad, the person collecting the coupon, the person posting to Pinterest. It’s the same person. The challenge with this data is to connect the dots not collected by retailers, or if collected, lies in disparate systems seldom enabling a link to customers across channels and media.
What companies need is a customer analytics platform which at its foundation captures all the base attributes of the customer, like name, demographic parameters, social media IDs and others. Then link this with analytical attributes for the customer, e.g. what is the most common trip type to the store, and frequency of visit. These analytical parameters are derived by linking internal data with customer data. Similarly linking market data can give a whole new insight about the customer.
Linking customers across channels is not an easy task. Technologically savvy retailers today are leveraging sophisticated algorithms to derive the link.
Once the customer foundation is in place, companies can ingrain “customer” at the centre of all processes.
Of course there is a clash between different departments and their insight requirements—at least at most retailers. I’ll echo and expand on what Matthew Keylock refers to as one essential requirement: leadership. But leadership is more than an insights leader, rather it goes to the broader retail enterprise and starts at the top. Planning, executing and decision-making require data and insights.
Ideally these insights are centered around the business strategy. And based on our work and evidence that supports retail growth, those insights are denominated in customers, sales and margins.
There is no question that these conflicts exist and that they pose a significant problem. We are in an era where we have more available data than ever about consumer behavior but that behavior is also more complex than ever, due to the proliferation of channels and touch points. Leading retailers are taking steps to integrate their customer experience and the insight functions that support the design and execution of that experience also need to be integrated.
Insights are the raw materials of a story. A good story reveals the hows and whys behind a characters actions toward a particular goal.
A well-constructed story will help your audience of stakeholders like Category Managers, Brands, R&D, and folks who care about service innovation and interaction design, come up with their own insights around the characters in your play as their lives intersect with your brand.
Insights drawn from customer insights are where innovation comes from. That’s a whole different set of skills (as we all know.)
This story reminded me of a quote from Einstein: “Fish will be the last to discover water.” And while other industries may have embraced ‘customer centered design’ methods because of scarcity—the really good news is that once we make the connection, we will find ourselves swimming in an ocean of possibilities. Managing this process is the problem called out in this prescient article.
The storytelling concept is key and worth a look—it’s been the topic de jure at insights conferences. So one more quote: “Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.” John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
One more extra credit quote: A paradigm shift is when previous scarcities become abundances creating new scarcities – something like that – from George Gilder. My point: Once we discover that we are swimming in insights, we’ll have some management problems dealing with the abundances.
There are always specialized insights in areas such as supply chain, operations, employees, and customers to drive the individual silo’s metrics. At the end of the day for retailers, what all these metrics are designed to do is to drive sales and customer satisfaction.
The rise of a Customer Experience or Chief Customer Officer that can pull together the cross function teams will be key for retailers to resolve the different insight requirements, and what actions are being driven by those insights.
As with any large organization, it is natural that there be clashes, or at least points of creative tension, across departments. In retail in particular, for example, an issue that one of our customers has reported relates to the sharing of pricing insights across departments: how much, what types, what level of granularity, what frequency, and so on.
In terms of resolution, in our case we assist our customers in resolving these tensions by making our services as flexible as possible, to cater to the full set of internal customers with the specific reporting and insights that they need.
First off, thanks for the great commentary on my interview with Joel. Some thoughts on best practices emergent from the discussion:
– Leadership & vision
– True customer ownership
– Universal understanding of humans and their behavior
– Alignment across the organization
– Linking/integration of disparate data—perhaps via a customer analytic platform
Bringing this all together, we need 1) customer stewardship empowered to align the organization around the customer experience and 2) integrate a multi-faceted view of the customer 3) using a customer analytic platform that 4) leverages a common framework of human (behavior) understanding.
Easier said than done. However, it does give us a vision of what to shoot for in a world of ever-growing complexity.