Winning in the Post-Brand Era (post 4 of 4)

Read post 1 here
Read post 2 here
Read post 3 here

Now what?

Marketers have reached an era when branding has lost some of its mojo.  The ongoing excellence of highly targeted marketing tools counterweigh the classic brand by making it possible to drive sales at a sharply reduced cost.  Marketers now must ask themselves "what's the best mix of approaches to accomplish our goals?"  How do marketers win in a world where they can't expect the brand to serve as the organizing principle?

Marketers must shift their focus from the destination, so to speak, to the Journey.

No, not that Journey

Still the wrong Journey

Now you're cooking with gas

McKinsey Consulting promulgated the concept of the Customer Journey a few years ago as a means for comparing disparate purchase paths.  However, it also doubles as a nifty way for organizing marketing communications.

Data and Data Strategy

For most of August, I’ve been writing about topics that seemingly have little to do with marketing--sports for one, automobile cost of ownership for another.  I suppose that I use August to clear my head the same way the French use August to clear Paris.

What traffic?  It’s August.

However, in a spectacularly circumlocutory way, I’ve hit on a theme that matters dearly to marketers of all stripes: that data and data strategy mean two very different things.

Data: Your Scariest Corporate Asset

Thanks in part to McKinsey’s coining of the term “Big Data” last summer, company data have never had more visibility than they do now.  At the same time, they have never faced more scrutiny.  Most of this scrutiny takes the form of concerns about privacy, the consumer-facing threat of data.  However, the larger data discussion has not--so far--broached the aspect that makes them the scariest assets a company has.

Once the near-exclusive domain of direct marketers, data has become the secret weapon du jour in-store, online and just about everywhere else.  The New York Times reported in February on how Target developed data models so sensitive that it could tell whether a customer had become pregnant before she told anyone.  Brands such as Virgin America and Axe have used Klout to evaluate customers.

So what makes data so scary?  Intangibility.