THE HIGHLIGHTS
Don’t lose the humanity from data-driven marketing
Data is a growing part of how brands target consumers more effectively and personalise services, but it must be assessed through the lens of human emotion.
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As our personal and professional lives change rapidly, we want brands whose marketing is increasingly driven by data to treat us as real people.
According to head of marketing at insurer Admiral Group, Alex Murphy, consumers may be digital-first but marketers need to think as they did 10 or 15 years ago.
He was speaking during the Festival of Marketing session ‘Getting the balance right: The future for data-driven marketing’ sponsored by Salesforce.
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“It does feel as if we have come full circle because brands lost their way a bit in the last decade when it came to building relationships with customers,” said Murphy. “We need to look at the first-party data we have and remember that there are real people at the end of it. People act in the way they do because of their own lives and motivations and we need to understand that. We must humanise the data and, as marketers, take the wider business with us.”
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report and its State of Marketing research reveal that 84% of people want to be treated as a person and not a number. However only 34% of brands admit they are currently able to treat customers as unique individuals.
Meanwhile, the company’s Future of Digital Customer Research 2020 identified that 60% of brands questioned ranked a ‘single source of truth’ as the most important digital capability for their organisation.
“Our job is to find the stories that connect with audiences and engage customers.”
Emily Latham, Channel 4
Jonathan Beeston, product marketing director in EMEA for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, said there can be a disconnect between brands and consumers at the moment because humanising digital moments can be difficult.
“Leading brands such as Admiral are changing the way they think about the customer journey,” he said. “The difficulties come with things like the cookieless future and how Apple is changing the way brands can track across apps. 2020 made data and insight more critical, which means brands need to prioritise digital and move quickly.”
Murphy said brands should work more closely with their data scientists to get a better understanding of the first-party data they are generating.
“At Admiral we have one analyst called James who I worked with recently to analyse why some customers continue to contact our call centre when we offer a full self-service online. We looked at this group to discover what made these people different from our other customers. Did we really understand their needs?”
The company soon realised why the call centre remained so popular. There was a concern among some customers that if they completed a policy form online themselves, they might make a mistake and the insurer would not pay out.
“In this instance it made sense to telephone a few of these customers and reassure them,” said Murphy. “This is about looking at the data and, rather than working on assumptions, getting someone with an analytical mind to work through the design thinking process to identify the problem and find potential solutions.”
He added: “If you just rely on emotionless data you do not understand the needs and worries of your customer, and you’re never going to have this real personal insight. It would take years to discover something that you can learn in a few weeks by working with a smart mind.”■
Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing
Admiral's Alex Murphy on applying 'design thinking' to personalisation
THE HIGHLIGHTS