I’m becoming a data nerd more and more. As I’ve grown in my marketing career I’ve come to both crave, and downright love, data. It’s the lifeblood of my decision making. I love seeing the spike in traffic when I post a new blog entry here, or seeing the varied locales visitors to my site are from. I just can’t get over the wealth of information all this data brings.
As you can imagine, when I was picking out individual sessions at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference I gravitated to the ones I’ve dubbed “data binges.” Sessions like Using Data to Provide New Insights into Customer Behavior and Segmentation, or Measuring Success in New Ways. I was immersed in new ideas and ways to mine Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and our CRM. It.was.awesome. Then, we went to our lunch keynote on Saturday and my mind was completely blown.
We sat down to hear Arthur Cohen, of LaPlaca Cohen, talk about their national study Culture Track. This annual study tracks cultural consumer behavior in U.S. and I was SO sad I had never heard of it before. The full study is available here (you’ll just need to enter your email, because they aren’t giving it away COMPLETELY for free 😉 … ), but you can listen to Arthur’s full presentation below, thanks to Americans for the Arts. I hope you’ll hang in and listen to the whole thing even if you aren’t an arts marketer, because there are some really interesting stats for any one who is interested in consumer behavior. This study is an absolute wealth of data, and I am so glad to finally be clued in.
After you watch Arthur’s presentation, I also highly recommend you watch the closing keynote by Sha Hwang. It was a really inspirational look at our culture, and he mixed in some great points about data, too. The big take away, though, was this – data is not a pathway forward, just a tool to help us get there.
Both of these perspectives on data and the cultural landscape of the U.S. were really insightful, so please do enjoy! Next time I’ll get back on track with that responsive web re-design we’ve been chatting about.