This post is part of an ongoing series on how marketing analysts can be more impactful. Read the previous blog here.
Every puddle, every leaf, every cigarette butt, is something to be studied and questioned. With every step, children are always learning; every new bit of information is tucked away to help them the next time they head out in their rain boots.
And anyone who has ever tried walking anywhere with a two year-old knows that that curiosity takes time. A lot of time. Part of the reason that you need to leave an hour early – to walk 200m with a two-year-old – is that every answer yields more questions…. “But why can’t I pick up the cigarette butt?” “Why is this leaf red?” “Will the splash be bigger if I jump instead of stomp?”
I like to say that the best analysts are those that are in touch with their inner toddler!
To be a great analyst you need to start thinking more like a two-year-old – and more like his ever-patient mother; ask a lot of questions and make sure you leave yourself time to answer them.
As a marketing analyst, each question you answer leads to a better understanding of customers and insights for the next campaign or discussion. The more questions you ask, the more you will learn. Ask more questions of the data to see what it can reveal; and ask more questions of the business to understand what’s motivating the analysis and what they hope to do with the results.
For example, you may start with the question, “How many customers churned last year?” The easy answer is 10,232. But a good analyst will follow that up with “Which customers?” “From which segments?” “Are they different from other customers in some way?” The answers to these questions might lead to hypotheses as to how to stop churn.
In the book Five Star Mind, Tom Wujec tells a wonderful story about a painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
"When Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Night Watch, was restored and returned to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the curators performed a simple, yet remarkable experiment. They asked visitors to submit questions about the painting. The curators then prepared answers to over 50 questions, ranking the questions according to popularity.
Some of these questions focused on issues which curators usually don’t like to include: How much does the painting cost? Has this painting ever been forged? Are there mistakes in the painting? Other questions focused on traditional artistic issues: Why did Rembrandt paint the subject? Who were the people in the painting? What techniques did Rembrandt pioneer in the particular work?
In a room next to the gallery which held the painting, the curators papered the walls with these questions (and answers). Visitors had to pass through this room before entering the gallery.
The curious outcome was that the average length of time people spent viewing the painting increased from six minutes to over half an hour. Visitors alternated between reading questions and answers and examining the painting. They said that the questions encouraged them to look longer, to look closer, and to remember more. The questions helped them create richer ideas about the painting and to see the painting in new ways.”
— Tom Wujec, Five Star Mind
Six minutes to over half an hour; that’s a five-fold increase in viewing time. What if you could take five times longer to do your analysis? What might you find?
Of course, marketing analysts need to work in the real world. And in the real world, time is not infinite. The toddler’s mother knows they need to reach the school by a certain hour to ensure her older child isn’t waiting in the school yard after the bell has rung! In business, you do need to get where you are going – in a timely fashion.
This often presents a dilemma for the analyst. Typically, the business user will want the results yesterday, while the analyst’s predilection is to examine under every rock. The key is to find the sweet spot – the right level of information to ensure the business user has the correct answer (not just the fastest one), and not so much that we become overwhelmed. At some point we reach the point of diminishing returns, where doing more is not adding value – and may even be eroding it.
The image below illustrates the concept. The “sweet spot” falls somewhere along the continuum.
Where the “sweet spot” is depends on the purpose and the value of the analysis.
To illustrate this, consider a client of ours whose agency asked a question about the geographic breakdown of the database, which was composed of a variety of disparate product holdings. Due to a number of factors, the analyst wasn’t 100% confident in address fields in their centralized database. So, they embarked on a rigorous analysis of various data sources to get an accurate count of customers in each postal code.
In the meantime, all the agency was looking for was a rough idea of counts across each province to determine if geography-specific imagery made financial sense. The delay in getting an answer meant the business decision was made long before the analysis was complete.
In another case, the business wanted to move ahead with rolling out a campaign based on initial “quick and dirty” results; however, a deeper analysis revealed that, while one campaign tactic had a higher response rate, the rate of abandonment was significantly higher negating all the benefit. Spending the time doing the further analysis saved the company thousands of dollars in wasted marketing.
Taking the time to ask the right questions at the beginning – and throughout the process -will yield results that are more impactful and more valuable. Analysis is not just the generation of reports, the development of an algorithm or the coding of an extract; true analysis is an iterative process.
Curiosity is innate in children; keeping that toddler’s spirit alive is key to your success as a Marketing Analyst.
Marketing Managers take note! Nurture your analyst’s inner toddler – give them time to explore. It will pay back in spades. And, if you don’t, beware the wrath of the toddler!
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Emma Warrillow of Data Insight Group Inc. has been helping her clients tell their story for over 16 years. If you would like to know what story your data is trying to tell you please contact info@datainsightgroup.ca. This blog was first published here.
