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Good morning, Marketers, how will you get to know your customers better today?
One sign of an effective marketing strategy over the long haul is how your customers build a community around your brand. This doesn’t always happen according to a rigid game plan, so it’s important to constantly ask, what are the common threads that bring your customers together? As you’ll see in our first piece, the analysis of shared beliefs, values and behaviors is central to anthropologists, and there are important ways they can contribute to your marketing strategy.
Customer insights are also provided by quality data, and we’ve seen a lot of partnerships and acquisitions that are changing and adapting to this shifting landscape. We’ve got updates on two new partnerships below.
Lastly, mark your calendars. MarTech conference returns online in September. The team here has been putting together the programs, and we can’t wait for you to experience it. Our theme for this show is “Data. Decisions. Results.” I hope you’ll join us.
Chris Wood,
Editor
Table of Contents
How anthropology can drive insights from your customer data
Digital marketing is great at analyzing what customers want and how they buy it. But for every data scientist who crunches the numbers, have you considered you might also need an anthropologist to sharpen your marketing insights? Any organized group of humans will have a culture, beliefs, rituals and shared outlooks that can be observed and described. They can be found locally, probably on the other side of this screen, looking for something to buy. If you understand them, you can sell to them.
We spoke with two consultants who bring anthropological insights to the business transformation space, as well as a professor of marketing. They agreed that while data tells you what people are doing, it’s not as good as telling you why.
What’s more, data science seems objective, but often isn’t. “If the coder doesn’t understand culture and how it shapes behavior, the algorithm will carry those biases,” said Kevin Porter, founder of consulting firm Anthropogenesis. “If you’re not asking the right questions, you’re hardly going to be able to objectively make sense of your data.”
Kantar acquires Numerator to hone North American insights
Kantar, the global provider of data-based insights into consumer behavior, has announced the acquisition of Numerator, a Chicago-based shopper insight and marketing intelligence platform. Through its worldpanel division, Kantar already gathers consumer insights in more than 45 countries outside the U.S. and Canada. Numerator brings insights from a digital panel of over a million North American consumers. In combination, the datasets will scan the behavior of some five billion consumers worldwide.
Kantar and Numerator apply analytics to purchasing data, the environment surrounding purchases, and consumer sentiment, primarily serving leading FMCG and CPG brands, but also government, finance, hospitality, automotive and other verticals.
Why we care. We spend a lot of time focusing on insights into individual consumers, the personal customer journey and customer journey analytics. This is a reminder that large data sets can be exceptionally valuable in demonstrating broad and significant trends in consumer behavior.
These kinds of aggregated data sets also raise fewer privacy alarms, but probably best serve businesses with very large audiences.
Microsoft Advertising expands Dynamic Remarketing beta
Previously only available for Retail (Hotels/Vacation Rentals), Microsoft Advertising has expanded the beta for Dynamic Remarketing to include Automotive (listings), Entertainment (events), and Travel (Tours and Activities) just in time for summer.
Along with this announcement, the company reminded advertisers about a few other new feature changes:
- The platform UI now makes it easier to see how big a segment size is, based on the markets you target for your ad campaign/ad group.
- Automated bidding tactics [Maximize Conversions, Maximize Clicks, Target CPA, and Target ROAS] are now available for the Microsoft Audience Network.
- New RSA insertions will allow you to dynamically insert countdowns for events like sales and add locations to maximize relevancy to the searcher based on their location.
- Changes to phrase match and broad match modifier now live across all markets.
- The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool has been deprecated now.
Allant Group in data partnership with Adstra
Data services provider Allant Group announced a partnership with data services company Adstra. Allant is in the business of providing customer insight data to help brands optimize marketing spend and improve customer experience. Adstra is a subscription-based suite of identity and data solutions aimed at connecting personally identifiable information with anonymized data across media.
The partnership is aimed at creating opportunities for midmarket and growing businesses to execute identity management and data strategies in a privacy-compliant way.
Why we care. Businesses of all sizes are looking for third-party data options as cookies deprecate and privacy regulations put more restraints on their data strategies. Smaller organizations might be feeling even more of a pinch, especially if they don’t have the vast pool of first-party customer data that a chain like Starbucks or Chipotle has.
To maximize the value and monetization of limited data resources, data vendors are teaming up and catering to this growing need from midsize organizations. By combining these resources while complying with GDPR, CCPA and other new legislation, brands will be able to continue to execute omnichannel strategies and avoid wasted money sending irrelevant messages to new customers.
Quote of the day
“The worst is when you want a product but it is out of stock or your size, and THEN the retargeters taunt you with it for weeks.” Ari Paparo, Head of Partnerships and Strategy, FreeWheel
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