Foreword: Our co-founders, Naveen & Sreelesh first met Dr. Ajay K. Kohli in October 2023 before there was any working prototype of the ZEPIC platform. At the time, Ajay had developed a research paper on how organizations can facilitate the generation of marketing insights with Dr. Roberto Mora Cortez and Dr. Wesley Johnston. 

Ajay, Sreelesh and Naveen had a great first meeting discussing the concept of ‘data connectedness’. The trio had multiple conversations afterwards.

This article by Ajay is testament to our shared belief of the critical role data connectedness plays in spawning marketing insights in an organization. The article combines theory with real-life examples that inspire.  

We're excited and very grateful to Ajay, as we share with our readers thoughts from a highly acclaimed and awarded academic whose articles are among the ten most cited ‘Journal of Marketing’ articles in a quarter century. 

A major logistics company maintained detailed data on the shipments it made on behalf of its e-Commerce retailers to their end-consumers. The company included ship-out day, date, items, item locations, and end-consumer addresses in one data system. The company also maintained data on items returned by end-consumers to the retailers in a second data system. When it connected the two data systems together, it realized that during the holiday season, items that were shipped out on Mondays had a 30% return rate compared to a 15% return rate for items shipped out on Fridays. In other words, shipping items out on Fridays generated more value for the company’s e-Commerce retailer customers (than shipping out on Mondays). Next, the company connected its pricing data system to the two ship-out and ship-in data systems. After some time went by, a company manager came up with the marketing insight of charging a slightly higher price to its customers for Friday ship-outs.

As this real-life example shows, when marketing data stored in different systems are linked with each other, they increase the odds of managers seeing connections that lead to valuable marketing insights.

Just what is a marketing insight?

 But first, what exactly is a marketing insight? Unfortunately, many executives use the term loosely to mean information, intelligence, or knowledge. This looseness keeps them from appreciating the actions they can take to come up with valuable marketing insights.

 A marketing insight is a sudden and unpredictable realization of the marketing action(s) that a firm could implement to create value for its customers and/or itself. 

First, a marketing insight is about the actions a firm could take to create value. It differs from other types of insights that refer to a deep understanding of customer needs, reasons for a distributor’s defection to a competitor, or determinants of a product’s success in a market, and so on.

Second, a marketing insight strikes an individual suddenly and unpredictably, in an “aha!” or a “Eureka” moment. This differs from an individual learning from market research, competitor analysis, published reports, and so on, in which the general form of findings upon completion of the research can be predicted.

Third, a marketing insight occurs to an individual, typically when by himself or herself. However, organizational environments can help create conditions to increase the odds of individuals coming up with marketing insights. 

How do marketing insights come about?

A marketing insight is generated by an individual going through an iterative process involving market sensing, strategizing, evaluating (and rejecting many potential marketing strategies before the right one occurs), and periodically disengaging from the process.  

How does “data connectedness” help?   

Data connectedness refers to the extent to which data systems in different parts of an organization are interconnected. Individual functions/units of an organization frequently have their own data systems (e.g., field sales operations system, online commerce system, customer service system) in each of the countries in which they operate (Biehl 2007). These data systems collect and store different types of data at different time intervals and at different levels of aggregation (Grover et al. 2018).

Interconnecting these disparate data systems increases the odds of coming up with marketing insights for several reasons.

First, by interconnecting disparate data systems, a company can increase the speed with which its managers can get responses to their queries relevant to a particular problem/issue regardless of where the data are stored (see Cheng and Cheng 2011).

For example, a company may store data on sales revenues following celebrity endorsements in one data system, trade promotions depth and timing in another data system, and pricing data in a third data system. A manager may want to know what prices were charged when celebrity endorsements were done after versus concurrent with trade promotions. When the manager can get this information quickly (via connected data systems), their thinking remains focused on the problem/issue at hand and progresses with relative ease. This increases the fluency in the manager’s thinking—one idea leading to a question, leading to an answer, resulting in a revision of the first idea, leading to yet another question, and so on. This increases the likelihood that the manager will generate and evaluate a greater number of potential marketing strategies and come up with more marketing insights(see related discussion in Althuizen and Reichel, 2016, p. 14).

Second, data connectedness enables managers in one country/region to learn about marketing strategies documented in another country/region’s data system. This is likely to help the managers see the potential usefulness of those strategies for their country/region or encourage them to modify those strategies to address their threats/opportunities (Shehzad and Khan 2013).

For example, managers in one department in a large airline used a data system that grouped passengers into four segments for developing various marketing initiatives. Upon connecting the data system with data systems in other departments, the managers discovered that another department grouped passengers into 10 segments (rather than four). This led to an evaluation of usefulness of different segmentation schemes and resulted in the airline adopting the 10-segment scheme for all departments in the airline.

Third, data connectedness enables managers to see a consumer, customer, or global account holistically from a greater number of vantage points reflected in the various data systems (Mela and Moorman 2018). This helps the managers generate and evaluate a greater number of strategies for addressing the consumer, customer, or global account.

For instance, an athletic shoe retailer with connected e-commerce and in-store data systems can more readily compare the behavior of a given consumer in online versus offline environments. The retailer may discover that a consumer’s product returns are more frequent after online transactions than after in-store transactions due to the poor fit of shoes purchased online. This may lead to the marketing insight of using AR (augmented reality) to enable consumers to “try out” shoes online before purchasing.  

Fourth, as shown in the opening vignette, data connectedness can enable managers to discover relationships between strategies (stored in one data system) and business outcomes (stored in a different data system), and help generate new/modified strategies (Peltier, Zahay, and Lehmann 2013)

In sum, marketing insights do not just “happen.”

A company needs to create an environment that enables and encourages its managers to come up with valuable marketing insights. Developing an interconnected system of data sets is an important part of what senior managers can do to help their managers generate valuable new marketing insights.

It is heartening to see new-age marketing technology software like ZEPIC help companies connect their data systems together with a friendly user interface. This is a big step forward for companies serious about generating marketing insights. I wish them the very best!

Thoughts from ZEPIC:

At ZEPIC, we believe in the power of data-driven customer experiences and predict it will be at the heart of all future marketing innovations. We're grateful to Dr. Ajay K. for sharing insights from his research on how organizations can generate valuable marketing insights through data connectedness.
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Recently, Deloitte Digital’s survey of 500 North American businesses found that "only 55% of surveyed brands have a CDP, which is increasingly judged the gold standard for collecting and activating customer data."

We are excited to bring ZEPIC to the world—a comprehensive Customer Insights and Customer Experience platform. ZEPIC empowers marketing practitioners with actionable insights while delivering delightful personalization for consumers. Achieving 'data connectedness' is the crucial first step in becoming data-driven, whether for marketing insights or personalization.