What Benefits Does Marketing Scientist Bring To Your Organization?

In the previous article, we have established why your company needs a marketing scientist. Now let’s take a closer look at what this person does on a daily basis and how this benefits your company.

This is sample of caption[/caption] Onwards. There’s a giant shift in the market underway. Smart companies are going from product-centric to customer-centric model. What does this mean and why should you care? It means the way how companies are creating new products or innovating existing products is fundamentally changing. It all started at the beginning of the 20th century with Henry Ford and his infamous quote:

"A customer can have a car painted any colour he wants as long as it’s black."

This was the time when factories were expensive to build, so only a few people could own them. The competition was localized and less intense. What happened next is history as they say:

• Competition is now global = your product or service is competing with similar offers from USA, China, Europe, Asia, India or even Africa, your competition is literally one click away
• Means of production got democratised = in many industries, everyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can be your competitor
• People are over-marketed, have almost everything they need and most of what they want = to stand out in a crowded marketplace your offer needs to be much more irresistible, specific and most of all personalized

When we innovate as an enterprise we can no longer rely on the old method. Here, we first come up with a product idea (minimal viable product) or improvement and then see if it solves a problem for our customers. This is a product-centric model = build a key and then look for a door with fitting lock. But we are now entering a customer-centric world = study the lock first and then build the right key. Or to put it in other words – look for and understand problems your customers have and only then come up with solutions. This is a crucial step for large enterprises with existing products – companies that want to sustain and increase their market share. That’s why they have a strong need to innovate their existing products. So how can you “study the lock”? To do this right, you will require a lot of information about your customer behaviour and their preferences. You already have this information – it’s stored as customer data. This is the exact point where a marketing scientist comes into play. Here’s how they can help you transform your company from product-centric to customer-centric model in 3 simple steps:

1. Marketing Data Management

Marketers are historically art, communications and advertising tribe, not an IT tribe. Yet in 2020, they own more software than IT. Marketers lack of IT skills leads to the following problem: Imagine your own kitchen. But in this case without any system how to manage it. Your ingredients are placed randomly on the shelves, you have no idea where cutlery is and you need 10 minutes just to find a pot. The whole place is a mess. Would you be able to cook dinner in this place? Maybe. But it would take you ages and you would need Gandhi’s patience to pull it off. Unfortunately, this is how data management looks like in most organizations – data packages lying randomly in different departments, with different “outer packaging” and no tags to unify them. You also get a lot of data packages that look the same, but you’re not sure if they belong to the same customer. You’re lost. One half-baked solution that many companies go for is this: imagine you want to make a cake. You put all the ingredients next to each other. But that doesn’t mean your cake is ready to eat. In order to do so, you need to “unify” the ingredients by “synchronizing” them together. That’s exactly how a marketing scientist can help – this person sets up a simple and unified system for your entire data warehouse. Once implemented, every data package has its own place on the shelf, has a nice tag and you can retrieve it anytime, from anywhere and send it to your favourite marketing tool. The best thing? All this is happening in real-time and with just a couple of clicks. You can be on executive retreat in the south of France and be aware of every single interaction any of your customers have with your brand.

2. Marketing Data Democratisation

Have you ever wondered what’s so great about the Internet? After all, it’s just a bunch of servers connected with cables. But the real power of the Internet lies in the ability to democratise information (data). This is what gives power to the people – they can freely access any information they like and use to improve their lives. Marketing scientist will empower all people in your organization in exactly the same way. So you can get the same innovation and improvement that the Internet has unleashed into our world. They will give the right people the right information in real-time so they can perform their job better. At the same time, you will be the person to decide who will see what kind of information. This leaves you 100% in control and compliant will all the data protection laws.

3. Marketing Data Activation

This is the mission-critical step that allows you to smoothly transform from product-centric to customer-centric business model. Here you will “study the lock”. That means to find out in exact detail how people use your product or service. And only then come up with the key – the most desired innovation. Here you can imagine the marketing scientist running an innovation laboratory inside your company – a place where breakthroughs happen and industry-disrupting products get created. With all your customer data unified and available real-time, marketing scientist can get her hands dirty and start bringing you some hardcore results. What is very helpful here is that most organizations have already a strong capability in one area, but they are missing data exchange – an easy way how data can talk together. And there are many examples already how this can improve your profits. The icing on the cake is that marketing scientist is using the scientific method = data-based decisions that remove all the guesswork from marketing and product innovation. You will know exactly what works and what doesn’t. Here are just a couple of examples of what marketing scientist and data activation can bring to your company:

• Improve and unify brand experience across all company channels, platforms and touch-points
• Find out exactly how customers engage with your platform and use this data to make them stay longer
• Perfect customer’s journey and get more sales and better retention as a direct result
• Answer your marketing and strategic questions with scientific precision and make profitable data-driven decisions
• Start with marketing revenue attribution and know how much your revenue will increase for each marketing dollar spent

As you can see, in our rapidly changing world the role of marketing scientist will become more and more indispensable for companies who want to succeed. If you are only starting your big data journey what you can do, is to book a free consultation now. Then together we can sketch a blueprint what kind of people you need to hire, how to train for the necessary skills and what software solutions would best suit your needs.