2017âs Data marketing ambitions: Wish fulfilment or pure fantasy?

They say time flies when you’re having fun. I guess I must be having my fair share as half of 2017 has already whizzed by. So I figured now would be a good time to review my 3 wishes for marketing data and technology in 2017 and see which ones the genie has seen fit to grant…

Wish 1: Marketing, IT, legal and compliance teams will become more joined up.

The genie’s not looking favourably on my first wish. Back in February, 68% of businesses said they were prepared for GDPR and if my wish had been granted we would expect to see this number improve as we barrel along towards the May 2018 deadline. However, the latest research from the DMA suggests that this number has shrunk to 55%. Whilst this is no doubt influenced by the emerging guidance from the ICO providing more detail and making businesses more aware of impacts, it also is likely a consequence of a lack of integration between very different businesses, each with their own agendas, language, and approach.

GDPR provides a perfect excuse to build a lasting approach to ensuring integration across these different disciplines, which will be essential for executing compliant data-informed marketing going forward. So, grab the bull by the horns, assemble your cross-functional team, assign a sponsor who can help to push things forward across organisational boundaries and work through the ICO’s 12 steps. Do it well and you’ll come out ready for GDPR and benefit from greater collaboration across disciplines that up until now have probably been pulling in different directions.

Wish 2: Customer Experience (CX) will become something more than another buzzword.

The premise of Customer Experience is pretty much common sense: understand the end to end brand experience from a customer’s perspective and use that understanding to eliminate points of friction. Do that well and consistently and you will have happier customers who will come back again and tell their peers. There is still a great deal of press and industry attention on the discipline of Customer Experience and it’s still an area of focus for businesses in 2017 with the latest trends report from Econsultancy finding that 22% of respondents rank 'optimising the customer experience' as the single most exciting opportunity for 2017.

However, there is a legitimate question as to whether marketing really is the correct home for pushing customer experience across the organisation. Marketing is still largely viewed as an acquisition champion and customer experience requires extremely broad powers and remit whilst marketing has a place in helping to design customer experience initiatives, it remains to be seen whether it will own it with Gartner suggesting that only 1 in 10 Chief Customer Officers reporting to marketing.

No matter how this plays out, Customer Experience is here to stay for a while, especially as the benefits are becoming clearer and clearer. For example, Eurostar’s promising start to 2017 may be down to a range of factors, but I’d be astonished if the company’s whopping 118 place jump in a 2016 league table of customer experience wasn’t one of them.

I reckon the genie is definitely considering granting this particular wish. 1 for 1 so far… let’s see how my third is panning out.

Wish 3: Technology vendors, agencies and “industry commentators” will stop talking in code.

I am a big fan of the Marketoonist and his “Buzzword” cartoons hit the nail on the head for me. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with buzzwords, often they can be a convenient short cut term for a complex concept (for example “Big Data”: yeah it’s a tad nonsensical but it also encapsulates a set of principles without having to list them exhaustively). But they are also massively divisive, especially when individuals from different disciplines get together around a shared problem (take GDPR for example and my first wish). Buzzwords and jargon get in the way of us talking the same language and are a barrier to effective dialogue.

Unfortunately, this wish really was my impossible dream and 2017 seems to be following the same trends of previous years with hyperbole continuing to drown out more balanced thinking.

This year’s themes continue to be the revolutionary effect of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Thinking, joined by the emerging belief that Bitcoin technology will add an extra cherry on top! I do love the role technology plays in supporting modern marketing, but it’s not the only element that matters. Creativity, people communicating effectively and working to a shared goal are the things that really drive success in my experience.

Right, I am off to count down the days until the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle report gets published. It’s sadly a highlight in my calendar…

Gary Arnold, Solution Strategy Director at Occam DM Ltd (part of the St Ives Group)