Getting more from your consumer data – A How-To Guide

November 16th, 2016 by Sarah Buckle

Clients often ask us: “How can I make more use of the data and insight I’ve invested in? How can I use what I already have to give really sound direction for future growth opportunities?”

Here’s our simple How-To Guide for getting more from your data

Step 1: Identify the big question you want to answer

It’s important to start a data review with a question – e.g. where are the biggest opportunities for my brand around the globe?  Or which channels offer the greatest growth potential in the next five years? Making sure your colleagues agree with the starting question is also vital if you want the output of the exercise to fuel change.  We usually hold a kick-off meeting to make sure everyone is on board. Any additional questions are identified up front so that they can be integrated into the analysis.

Step2: Review all your data – what you have already and what’s readily available

Many clients have been amazed at the practical insights and solutions that have been retrieved from standard data resources such as sales/transaction data, consumer satisfaction, syndicated category data, communications and website analysis, call centre data, CRM data, tracking data and ad hoc qualitative and quantitative research. We can also integrate these data with published data sources like those from government and regulatory bodies and from industry or trade associations, to identify big picture opportunities.

Step 3: Focus on your consumer objectives

Practical and sustainable growth strategies come from identifying how your business can better understand and reach your consumers.

We listen to our clients to understand what their consumer and market growth objectives are.
We then work with them to identify what consumer insights and market understanding can be extracted from current in-house and externally published data.

And we’re not talking about major data mining or data merging exercises here: just a modest focus on the practical consumer and market learning that can be extracted from these different sources.

Then we create the frameworks for growth by using our expertise to interrogate and integrate these data sources.

Step 4: Create frameworks to support your analysis

Given the wealth of data that often exists, it’s vital to have a framework to give structure to the project and ensure outputs are meaningful and actionable.  Once we have pinpointed the question to be answered, reviewed what’s available and determined your consumer goals, we can apply one of our frameworks and approach our analysis systematically.  Our frameworks are flexible and often generated in response to a specific client need.  Examples of how we’ve used them to identify future growth opportunities are:

• Using local market and brand data to provide an international overview of priority growth markets for a strategic business plan
• Interrogating sector trend, market and brand data to demonstrate the impact of the recession on a consumer sector in Europe and identifying 5 key elements to a recovery strategy
• Analysing call centre data to identify drivers of consumer satisfaction and behaviour at renewal to help optimise retention
• Combining published data sources with consumer insight to map the business potential for a new business proposition through the European agriculture supply chain
• Integrating a vast array of international brand, consumer, sales and social trends data to provide the foundation for a segment-based global marketing strategy and drive efficiencies in global marketing spend
• Deep diving into published and market data to provide a framework for a European business consumer-based growth strategy
• Mapping diverse market data together to identify the optimum service hubs for an international business technology service

All of these new insights were successfully gleaned from data that existed already, meaning they were very cost efficient exercises.

If you want to know more about using this approach to uncover growth opportunities, then do get in touch.

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