Analysis Paralysis: When a marketer cannot decide

Looking back at my B-School days, one of the statements I got to hear often was “Marketing is so much simpler than finance, there are lesser or practically no numbers involved. It’s all about creative pictures, flashy taglines and big campaigns”. It was one of the major reasons why a lot of people seemed interested in pursuing marketing as a specialisation for their MBA.

After 10 years of my career as a corporate marketer, I can tell you with honesty that the above generalisation couldn’t be further from the truth.

Every decision and action a sound marketer takes is more often than not based on some data point, insight or fact. Some of these insights are available through primary research, but most of it is also visible through the data points being captured in the daily course of business – sales, ageing, deal size, penetration etc. The width and depth of information (read Big Data) available is so overwhelming, that it is beginning to seem like a marketer has to swim the Pacific Ocean to arrive at his destination.

The fact that most marketers use numbers to understand and even communicate data only reflects that numbers will continue to play a key part in any marketer’s life. But what happens when you get to a point when there are just way too many numbers?

We are in an age where marketers are able to track multiple data points throughout a customers’ journey - right from the AWARENESS stage to the POST PURCHASE stage. With the onslaught of Big data, Digital Marketing, IOT and AI we can only expect that this deluge of data will keep growing. In fact, in a lot of digitally forward organisations, data is being captured not just at a customer organisations level but even at an individual level. In such a scenario how does a marketer analyse and take decisions? How does he or she focus on data points that matter and choose to leave aside some data points that don’t?

This question has baffled me many times in the past. In the below points, I am sharing a list of ways to look through the pile of data. My points below are influenced by years of watching and learning from experienced marketers and my personal understanding of their decision-making process.

1. Eyes sharp focused on the goal – Before you begin any campaign, project or task it is imperative to establish the end goal. Once you’ve done this, you’ve pretty much created a filter through which you will look at all existing and new data points. Without establishing the goal, any effort just becomes a pointless exercise. You may contest that many times the life of marketers isn’t that simple. Their jobs need them to work collaboratively with multiple people and functions and their challenges are usually massive. At such times, their goals are not very apparent, but rather keep evolving during the project. To add to this, the variables to consider just add to the confusion. In such cases, I recommend to break up the larger challenge into smaller parts and attach goals for each of these smaller milestones.

2. Connecting the dots: I have noticed that sometimes it just helps to list down or simply place the variables available in front of you and spend some time thinking about them. Usually, you will notice that most of them can be clubbed into a few buckets and the variables in the same bucket emerge from a maximum of 2-3 data points. The rest of them are just ways of representing the same basic data differently. As marketers, aiming to connect basic data points by understanding the relationships between them clearly is a great skill. Once we are able to understand the relationships between various variables and internalize them, we will be able to have better judgment. In many cases, I have been able to unearth 'not-so-apparent' relationships between data points simply by observing trends closely.

3. Avoid complication to avoid confusion: I have seen many marketers who think they need to employ the most complex methods to extract the hidden gold out of data points - Every time. For someone who is a strong advocate of simplicity, I think this does not need to apply for each and every decision. Most marketing decisions usually need just two or three variables to be considered. However, these variables are usually the most basic ones that have the highest impact on the outcome. Typically these would be sales numbers, costs, number of customers engaged, number of deals etc. Yes, to deep dive and have focused discussions on key issues, we might need to use two or more basic variables to create ratios and comparisons. But that becomes much easier, once we have a clear understanding of the basic data points.

4. Is only data enough to make great decisions? One of my earlier bosses used to say while crunching numbers “You may never be in a place where you have all the data points you need or they may not all be available in good time. But before you start, just imagine you have all the data points you need and list them down. Now identify the ones that you do not have and see if you can get a reasonable estimate/approximate value from the data points available to you?” Initially, I found this to be a very dicey proposition. How was I to estimate or approximate values of data that I don’t have? While the above-mentioned approach may seem dicey at the surface it did manage to have a very profound learning for me. It was simply based on the fact that if you have closely considered and noted all the available data points, with your experience you will be in a position to make the most rational assumptions and approximations. And that is how marketers can develop their so-called ‘GUT’. Gut decisions can be a dilemma for any marketer, but it is proven that many times it is something you cannot do without. Marketers need to work on developing a knack of using their gut reasonably.

Analysis and decision making remains a daily feature in a marketer’s day. It’s not something that one learns overnight but it comes only after years of practice. Having said that, a marketer needs to get comfortable with numbers and their relationships in the real world.