First, how about some gift ideas for your insight team?
Otherwise, perhaps it’s time for an infographic on the big bird for the big day?
The secrets of Black Friday revealed: So how do companies persuade us to spend?
Hope that was a little fun as you look forward to those Christmas parties. Do you have any favourite festive data, analysis, research or database marketing stories to share? If so, please let us know below.
Poll: Which is your favourite ‘top tip’?
Thanks for all the positive feedback I’ve had on our recent series of ‘top tips’ for the different technical teams which make up the full breadth of customer insight. It’s encouraging to know that those tips did help other leaders.
In fact it set me to wondering which top tip was the most helpful. So, to once again help shape future content here on CIL, see below for our latest poll.
I’ll share the results of that poll once participation is high enough to give us robust results. But I’m not arrogant enough to think that wisdom resides here, so please do also share your ‘top tips’. I’d love to hear about the lessons you’ve learnt while leading a data, analytics, research, database marketing team or whole customer insight department. Go on, use the comments section below & see if others have found the same as you.
Those sharing the most useful or popular tips may be invited to be a guest blogger here (and I’ll find a prize for them as well).
I look forward to hearing your thoughts & seeing your votes – let’s help each other succeed as Customer Insight becomes a profession.
This is a new event in the UK and one I attended yesterday, as a speaker on Behavioural Economics. It’s well worth digital leaders attending in future.
Right from the start things boded well as they had chosen a different and engaging venue. Bounce (121 Holborn, London) is the official ‘home of ping-pong’ and is literally the place where the game was invented in 1901. This gave guests the promise of a ping-pong championship after the event, as well as a more visually interesting location.
Another bonus was the approach taken by Global Reviews – for this to be a relaxed meeting of like-minded leaders across a number of verticals. There were no sponsors pushing their wares, no exhibition stands & no sales pitches. It really was a relaxed time to be challenged by other viewpoints and discuss what it might mean for your own business.
The day was divided up into three sections of panel debates (including attendees not speakers, which was a good approach) followed by keynote speakers. There was also a team exercise before and after lunch, to give plenty of outlet to those competitive urges. Compere and inquisitor of panels was the excellent Clare McDonnell of Radio 5 Live – a very likeable and effective facilitator.
A further bonus was the hiring of a graphic artist to visually capture (with flip charts & coloured markers) the main themes of each session – which made a much more amusing set of notes to review. Clive was later available for caricatures in between ping-pong bouts & was very good at those too. I’ll upload some of his most useful visualizations of key points when I get them. It could be a whole new genre of ‘conference cartoons’.
Great job compering #UKDLS today @ClareMcdonnell1, kept us all on our toes and insightful summing up, pleasure working with you!
How was that as means of writing up an event? Did it work for you?
For those you who have been asking for more digital specific insights and technical advice, I have been listening. To complement our recent content more focussed on effective insight leadership (see our ongoing ‘3 tips’ series), here are two guest items with a digital and technology emphasis.
First up is a post from BraveMedia’s blog, shedding some light on the murky and ever-changing world of Google’s search algorithms, for those challenged with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for their digital marketing content. What drew me to this post in the first place is the rather cool and eye-catching visualisation, so it is also another example of effective information visualisation.
The next guest content covers the potentially dry, but vitally important, topic of data modelling, when building or enhancing databases. I’ve recently been reviewing training material on this topic for a client who now needs an ‘in house’ CRM system. What struck me about LearnDataModelling.com is the simplicity and effective summarisation of material which is too often left to appear overly complex, perhaps so non-IT types don’t challenge too much? So, I share this as an example of both an important skill for customer data management teams (within customer insight not just IT) and as an example of keeping it simple.
I hope those were helpful and you enjoyed some unashamed ‘geekiness’ this time. But for those of you are thinking “all I heard was blah, blah, blah, blah”, don’t worry I’ll be returning to the English language next week.
Have a good weekend and do share your best tips for SEO or Data Modelling, I’m sure there are plenty of equally good resources out there.
Following on from tips for your research and database marketing teams, this week we turn our attention to the 3rd quadrant of customer insight, your analytics team.
Given the emphasis of advertising & events for this community, it’s tempting to focus on technical skills.
So much social media airtime is given over to new software, coding skills or data solutions, you would think that was all that was needed for effective analytics teams. But there is so much more to developing analysts who will make an impact in your business.
I don’t know about you, but one of the perennial issues I experience when communicating analytical findings to clients, or fellow business leaders, is to help them avoid the pitfall of assuming that correlation equates to causation.
Once a relationship can be shown between some customer characteristics and the objective of interest, say likelihood to purchase, people love to rush to hypotheses as to why this makes sense – even when it is extremely unlikely and causation has not been proven.
Now there are plenty of studies showing examples of spurious correlations, like the proportion of blue-eyed customers coming into a store in Moscow and the murder rate in Los Angeles. So, an extreme example can normally be thought up to illustrate this danger. However, too few people actually understand causality and how it can be proven statistically. This is also important because of the unconscious bias that we all have to seek to simplify problems and attribute causation as soon as possible; thus it can feel like ‘swimming up stream’ to suspend judgement and seek robust evidence.
Have you read this? How do you help others understand whether to not they have proven causality?