Does Company Culture Help or Hinder Marketing Analytics?

Apress author Jerry Rackley was recently interviewed by online magazine MarketingID.net to talk about how company culture helps (and sometimes hinders) analytics initiatives. His book Marketing Analytics Roadmap, focuses on methods, metrics, and tools used to leverage marketing analytics, and this short interview allowed him to dig into precisely how the overall culture at an organization can create lift or drag on creating a data-focused environment.

Barriers include simply trusting your “gut” and not reacting to what is realistic, working on what’s urgent instead of what’s important, and the fear of being punished for making mistakes. On the other hand, dynamics that create lift include an understanding that you will make mistakes but you will also learn from them, an overall focus on what’s important and not just urgent, and a culture that creates an environment of transparency and shared metrics/data.

How can your organization become more data-driven? By focusing on the right set of objectives, and deriving marketing’s objectives from them. Rackley encourages marketers to not ever get untethered from the organization’s primary goals. Recognize how far you need to go and plot a realistic course, making sure to focus on learning, patience, and starting small.

Most of all, he cautions, don’t go it alone. Get support from seemingly unlikely allies like IT and finance. These groups can provide skills, data, and business cases that will help pave a smooth path to a data-driven future.

To view Jerry’s interview in it’s entirely (about 10 minutes), check out www.marketingid.net.

(by Susan McDermott)