[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/07\/11\/data-marketing-tactics\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/07\/11\/data-marketing-tactics\/","headline":"Going dark: Less dark data, more hard marketing decisions","name":"Going dark: Less dark data, more hard marketing decisions","description":"Data analytics has hit a plateau, thanks to dark data. Execs and leaders must focus on breaking silos and make more hard-data decisions.","datePublished":"2016-07-11","dateModified":"2021-12-28","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/nicholas-kontopoulos\/#Person","name":"Nicholas Kontopoulos","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/nicholas-kontopoulos\/","identifier":125,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fb36cca2088417df2699005e70d62e9a244d1038869a8a9061e4deadd352eb51?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fb36cca2088417df2699005e70d62e9a244d1038869a8a9061e4deadd352eb51?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Future of Commerce","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","width":172,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/dark-data-FTR.jpeg","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/dark-data-FTR.jpeg","height":375,"width":1200},"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/07\/11\/data-marketing-tactics\/","about":[{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/cdp-customer-data-platform-solution\/","name":"CDP: Customer Data Platform","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_data_platform"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/cdp-customer-data-platform-solution\/cdp-customer-data-platform-general\/","name":"CDP: Customer Data Platform","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_data_platform"]},"Consent data management",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/customer-experience\/customer-data\/","name":"Customer Data","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_data","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q56278300"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/customer-experience\/customer-experience-general\/","name":"Customer Experience","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_experience","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q984142"]},"Customer profiles: Customer Identity + Access Management (CIAM) for B2B and B2C",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/marketing\/","name":"Marketing","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marketing","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q39809"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/marketing\/marketing-general\/","name":"Marketing","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marketing","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q39809"]}],"wordCount":973,"keywords":["CDP | Customer Data Platform","Data","Marketing"],"articleBody":"Data analytics has hit a plateau.A 2015 Sloan Management study found that, less and less, companies believe analytics gives them a competitive edge, from 67 percent reported in 2012 down to 61 percent in 2014.With more data scientists, more technology, and more of everything else, shouldn’t businesses be getting more of an edge? Why are we getting less?I’ll tell you why: We’ve done the easy stuff. We’ve brought metrics into marketing and operations. We’ve begun measuring everything instead of shooting blindly in the dark. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. Now it’s time to roll our sleeves up and make the hard marketing decisions.      Types of customer data: Definitions, value, examples                Types of customer data serve distinct purposes. Identity data, descriptive data, attitudinal data, behavioral data defined, with examples.      Dark dataFamiliar with dark matter\u2014the invisible material in our universe that keeps everything from tearing apart?Physicists estimate it outweighs visible matter (like planets, stars, and moons) six-to-one. That is, we can only see a fraction of what exists. The vast majority of everything is invisible\u2014not just to the naked eye, but to any device humans have created so far. In fact, the only reason we know dark matter exists is because we can measure its effect on the rest of the universe.Wherever you work, I promise that your business analytics works the same way. The vast majority of what you have is ‘dark data’: the metrics, measurements, and information that sits around, invisible, unusable, and\u2014as far as you know\u2014irrelevant to rest of your business universe.You know it’s there (you collected it in the first place, right?), but it’s useless. And that’s the difference between dark matter and dark data. You can see the effect of dark matter. Dark data has no effect\u2014and that’s the problem.      As data breaches abound, customer data management becomes C-suite priority                Customer data management best practices allow businesses to fortify their customer relationships. The potential for growth, in commerce and trust, is massive.      Bring dark data into the lightWe don’t need more data. We need more decisions.Collecting more data won’t help if it just gets stored away in a drawer or on a server somewhere. More dark data won’t shed light on your challenges or deliver additional customer insight. Hiring even more analysts and data scientists won’t solve anything if it just opens up the fire hydrant even more \u2013 and the marketing tech of the future will make this task more and more easy.If you want a real competitive edge, you need to start doing what everyone else isn’t: making the hard decision to let data drive your high-level decisions, instead of using dark data as a crutch for bad decisions.Peter Drucker said, “The business enterprise has two\u2014and only two\u2014basic functions: marketing and innovation [\u2026] all the rest are costs.” You probably use data to try to cut costs (like a logistics company optimzing drivers’ routes to decrease delivery time and fuel consumption) or to sell more (like a\/b tests to see which email gets the most opens).That’s the low-hanging fruit. We’re in an age now where we have to move past that. We have to use data to construct the customer experience\u2014and then figure out how to optimize it. The bad news is, you’re going to have to kill your silos.      Improving customer experience through customer data\u2014CDP for CX                Improving CX through customer data makes intuitive sense, but having a tool and using it effectively are two very different things. CDPs are the data remedy we need.      Decision #1: Kill the siloWhat!? Kill our product department? Reorganize the entire business around functions instead of products?I know. The idea of restructuring your entire business sounds impossible.Thousands of people. Millions of man-hours. Possibly lots of dollars.You have to do it. Switching from delivering a product to delivering an experience is the next “big thing.” We live in the age of commoditization. Nearly every product or service has been turned into a commodity that nearly anyone can offer. It’s a race to the bottom to see who can sell the most widgets for the lowest price.Yet, a 2015 Harvard Review study that surveyed best-in-class companies versus ‘underachievers’ found that the underachievers’ number one obstacle to improving the customer experience was organizational silos. I’ll tell you why.All the data that you need is sitting in different marketing departments, various customer-service departments, and multiple operational departments scattered throughout all the silos of your company.You have to break down those silos and walls, to reach across to rival managers, and to jointly leverage the dark data sitting useless around the company.      Telco trends 2022: Customer revolution arrives, silos come tumbling down                Top telco trends 2022: New revenue streams, digitization like AI and IoT, changing mobile consumption trends, and enterprise connectivity.      Focus on the customer experience at all costsOnce you and your peers\u2014or rivals, depending on how deeply ingrained the silo culture is in your company\u2014make the decision to work together, it’s surprisingly easy to get it done.State-of-the-art tech exists that lets you bring data together from across multiple platforms, sources, and dynamics so that you can start wringing competitive value from your previously dark data almost immediately.The first step (overcoming those operational silos) is a big one. But my experience with our clients has been that, once they take that step, they’re always glad they did.You don’t need more hard data. You need more hard decisions.  Your competitionwants your customers.Is your brand built to keep them?Unlock strategies to power your enterprise HERE.This post originally appeared on Campaign Asia and is republished with permission."},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"2016","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"07","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/\/07\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"11","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/\/07\/\/11\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"Going dark: Less dark data, more hard marketing decisions","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/07\/11\/data-marketing-tactics\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]