G
urmej Bahia, Expedia’s director of
customer marketing, explains the
reasons behind his warnings to marketers at BrandMAX about the dangers of too much data.
Understandably, how to get the best ROI from your marketing budgets was always going to be a big part of the agenda for the inaugural BrandMAX (
www.brand-max.net) Summit which was held on 21-22 September.
As Guy Hayward, chief executive of JWT UK, who chaired the event on the first day, explains: ‘The marketer’s biggest challenge is deciding where to spend their money. It has been said that there have never been more ways to reach a target audience, but it has never been as hard to connect with them, and that is true; clients need a range of connected solutions, rather than just an above-the-line campaign with a digital element tagged on.’
So, from Andy Street, managing director of John Lewis Partnership, to Nina Bibby, global chief marketing officer at Barclaycard, we heard different answers to this challenge. With a background in online and analytics, Gurmej Bahia, Expedia’s director of customer marketing, has yet another take on it. He thinks that
marketers can
struggle with too much data in a mobile-enabled, socially networked and digital world. ‘Today, you have more data on the consumer than you had before. Organisations find it very hard to go through that data to find the metrics that matter,’ he warns.
This is key to understanding what the ROI is for your marketing activities.
‘In the online marketing world, there has always been a good understanding of what money you spend and what you get back. In the
42 entrepreneurcountry
offline world, it has been harder to attach a firm ROI to brand metrics,’ says Bahia. ‘Because Expedia is an online business which has grown by understanding the needs of the customer, it is very driven by analytics, very driven by making sure the brand has a clear ROI, but applying ROI to softer brand metrics can mean drowning in data unless you apply very firm KPIs.’
Complexity is added, however, by the changing consumer and marketing landscape, ‘especially with the introduction of social’, argues Bahia. ‘Everyone is trying to find ways of using social and trying to understand it as a form of communication in different ways: brand engagement or PR, customer service, direct acquisition.’
He adds: ‘I don’t think there is anyone that has really figured it out 100%. Everyone is still trying to find their feet. Potentially, at a PR and brand level, there is an easy way to create engagement – by creating
ROI boost
Expedia challenges analytics to
fan pages and so on. But it’s about going beyond that and looking at how that platform can work and its relative role with other channels and other media such as a branding thing that you air on TV.’ In effect, digital is adding layers and layers when there is communication, and consumers think about a brand.
This is the thinking that drove Bahia’s keynote speech, entitled ‘Competing on analytics – real time,
marketing investment’ at
BrandMAX. At the heart of it, he set out to answer the following question: if organisations now have access to better data, and can therefore make choices on investment and channels more rapidly, based on evidence, then why are so many still saying that they know that a percentage of their spend is wasted, or that they aren’t confident about how channels interact together to achieve multiplier effects?
Expedia has a partial answer. It has focused on the challenge of rapidly
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