The Analytics Brand

New Person: So, what do you do?

Me: Analytics

New Person: Oh, so like opens and clicks. I get it.

Me (running late): Yep.

Sound familiar? Oh, my analytics friends, where have we gone astray? That the general population relegates our core function to tallying up email opens or campaign responses to a mere proportion? Are we not more valuable than that?

Nay, I tell you. We've got brains. We've got skills. And we're not afraid to make the world a better place...assuming we have access to a little bit of data. So, why don't others know about all of the other impacts we analysts can deliver (not that there's anything wrong with opens and clicks, but it's just a tiny, tiny sliver within the suite of analytical offerings)?

As a collective discipline, all analytics professionals can benefit by furthering our "brand." Our Analytics brand. There is a largely uneducated -- in an "analytics" sense -- pool of folks at our organizations who do not have the faintest idea about what we do, and it is our job to educate them. 

1. We're book-smart, but we're also biz-smart.
2. Don't know how to "follow your dollars?"  We do.
3. How many opens and clicks?  Sure, we can do that. But we can also tell you who, what, where, when,...and sometimes, if you're head hasn't exploded by this point, why.
4. Don't have any levers to pull? Let us build one for you. And we can even tell you which one to pull.
5. We can't see the future, but through predictive modeling, we can get pretty close.
6. You're not "data driven" unless you've got one of us on staff. Don't fool yourself.

Who's ready to stand with me and set the record straight? And hopefully, someday, instead of getting a "oh, so like opens and clicks" we might get a "oh, so like segmentation and  multi-pass optimization."

Peter Eliason

www.petereliason.com

Photo credit commercial license: https://flic.kr/p/4YpCBd