Shifting Marketing Culture from Gut-Data to Data-Data

Moving towards data-driven marketing is hard. 

Surprisingly, implementing new technology is not the biggest challenge to bringing about changes in your marketing strategy. The real obstacle is a marketing culture that refuses to shift from “gut-data” to “data-data”. 

Why is it so hard to make the change? 

Although we know the value of intelligence-led decision-making, this can be hard to implement when the data tells us something, but our gut feeling says something else. As marketers, we’ve relied on that gut feeling for so long that it makes it hard to prioritise data insights above our own intuitions.

But that’s exactly what we need to learn to do.

To be able to act on “data-data” and secure a competitive advantage, we need to support our marketeers and marketing teams to make the change.

To be able to act on “data-data” and secure a competitive advantage, we need to support our marketeers and marketing teams to make the change.

This requires a process and talent shift – we need to put processes in place that support, reward and celebrate data-driven decision-making, and we need to upgrade skills. Whenever we challenge the existing way of doing things, we meet resistance: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” We must put a reward mechanism in place to encourage data use by our team and remove the fear of “getting it wrong”.

In short, there is a need for cultural change – we need to lead and support our teams towards this new way of making decisions. We need to reassure them that learning to put “data-data” before “gut-data” isn’t going to make them obsolete. 

This reassurance is vital if we are going to lead people out of their comfort zones. 

That’s because change can be scary. 

But not as scary as the vast wasted potential of all that data we’re currently failing to act on.