In the 1960 American Western, The Magnificent Seven, a group of seven gunfighters are hired to protect a small village. The seven share traits. However, they’re all different and work best together, so too, when combined, the “Seven Data Dimensions” can protect and empower your brand.
When it comes to strategic understanding, data insights are both fashionable and foundational when building evidential intelligence for the organisation to follow. Most brands understand data’s value. However, many are unsure of the various dimensions of value that it can deliver across their end-to-end operations.
Over the next seven weeks, this series will provide an overview of the magnificent seven datasets that most brands have access to and that can be leveraged to gain insight and understanding to design strategies, develop tactics, deliver experiences and drive innovation. Working with the global mTab network and other industry experts this series will pull out examples, and top tips, from across the globe where brands are most effectively harvesting and deploying data.
First, let’s review these ‘magnificent seven’ data dimensions and look at each of the general dimensions of insight they can provide to an organisation. In most companies, each of these data dimensions already exist. This means it’s merely a matter of identifying, collecting and organising the insight to start leveraging it.
So, each of the magnificent seven in turn:
Social engagement channels
Companies use many social channels to engage markets with. These include but aren’t limited to, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Regardless of whether a brand chooses to specialise through some of these or tries to participate in every platform, there’s a wealth of insight that can be delivered from them. Most provide ethnographic insight into customer’s behaviours, perceptions, attitudes and preferences, as well as a perspective into their engagements and experiences with the brand. Whilst the channels can deliver brutal honesty, this information can be invaluable in running a business.
Online reviews
Online reviews are a direct channel to understanding several perspectives on your company. The sources for reviews are vast and can be generated both from internal and external rankings and reviews. These can deliver a single-source view on your stand-alone product or a comparative perspective with both similar in-house offerings or competing products. Third-party reviews can also be editorial in nature (like Consumer Reports) or through distribution channels (like Amazon). Regardless of the source, the information can deliver insight on a product’s market position and how consumers and independent reviewers perceive it.
Customer feedback
Whilst social media insight is generally ethnographic in nature, customer feedback channels, like customer surveys or focus groups, provide direct intelligence from customers in various formats and detail levels related to a brand’s high-level perceived value and specific product performance. It can also provide purchase trigger information as well as comparative analysis with competitors when leveraged.
Purchase data
Purchase data is another fact rather than opinion-based dataset. It can be generated from several purchase points ranging from point-of-sale systems to ecommerce platforms to apps. Each of these gives a viewpoint into consumer’s purchase behaviours and buying trends. They can also provide behavioural information by varying customer types to more effectively engage and motivate them.
Customer service information
Customer service information may be the most traditional of the frontline information sources given call center’s longevity. However, online service bots, email customer support and app assistance all add new digital dimensions to largely understanding the issues and problems customers are having with different dimensions of your company. These data channels provide information on product issues and areas of improvement and optimisation with a solution’s design and performance. And while they can be difficult to take on board, it’s very dangerous to otherwise ignore them. Some of the most innovative companies place these data sources front and center to understand the primary issues to resolve and product gaps to innovate.
Search intelligence
Search is the cornerstone of online engagements. Therefore, there’s much information that can come from search sources including search engine optimisation and marketing. There are intriguing ways to dissect and analyse this information, like Answer the Public, which provides visualised mapping of search topics. Beyond understanding your own brands’ products, this also helps you understand competitor’s relative strengths and weaknesses to pinpoint opportunities and threats. Search data analysis delivers varying perspectives on your brand’s market position, health and ongoing innovation. These also provide invaluable customer perception around the quality of products, services and support.
Employee feedback
One of the most often overlooked data channels for insight is the employee base. Great companies start with understanding the employee sentiment before all else as employees are the company’s frontline to customers, clients and markets. There are multiple ways to measure employee satisfaction from surveys and reviews to the traditional suggestion box, and employee review sites like Glassdoor. Gathering this feedback is important since it provides insight into the employee’s opinions, particularly with the brand’s state and health, but also the workforce’s culture and performance. These factors can have a direct impact on the relationships with clients and consumers.
Getting Started
All of these dimensions of data provide elements towards understanding a brand’s holistic health. Each of them should be considered essential in how they are mined and analysed for information. This article series will break down each of these data dimensions in terms of where the data can be sourced and analysed to provide evidential intelligence for the organisation to follow.
The key is to strategically set a plan for each of them in order to identify, collect, analyse and democratise the intelligence. There also has to be ownership discussions in terms of who currently ‘owns’ the data sources and who will manage each of them on an ongoing basis. From there, it becomes a matter of creating a habit of returning to the data to identify and understand shifts and evolutions in order to design strategies, develop tactics, deliver experiences and drive innovation.
