Your Data-Driven Marketing Is Harmful. I Should Know: I Ran Marketing at Google and Instagram

A quantitative mind-set has led marketers to forget about building relationships with customers as people.

Since around 2011, marketers – along with the rest of corporate America – have developed a data-driven mind-set. Intuition and gut decision making have given way to quantitative approaches to marketing, and personalization has replaced personal relationships. Granted, marketers may never have truly embraced the notion of human connections as the heart of the profession. But even that ideal has fallen away as the quantitative mind-set has taken over.

“Today, the holy grail of advertising can be framed as personalization meets attribution.”

Businesses are also neglecting their foundational, story-based elements, in favor of measurable operational and transactional functions.

Business activities occur on a spectrum – from the operational/transactional at one end to the firm’s foundational elements at the other. The more operational activities lend themselves to measurement and data-driven approaches. The foundational elements, in contrast, have a more qualitative, emotive, narrative nature: the company’s vision and mission, its core values and purpose, its communication style. You can’t draw a line between the two kinds of activity, and you can’t divorce the emotional aspect from business, at any level. But marketers have been trying by focusing on the measurable, transactional, operational end of the spectrum – because that’s easy – and neglecting the necessary foundational, relationship-based activities.

“Corporate obsession with big data has made it far too easy to ignore the foundational elements of business entirely.”

As ever, marketers need to build emotional connections with customers.

Of course, data have value and quantitative tools work. But marketers shouldn’t discount the importance of building human connections with customers. This begins with remembering that transactions have human beings at the other end. The concept of a “business relationship arc” can organize your thinking about customer relationships. The arc begins with the customer’s first encounter with the brand – similar to your first meeting with a person. As the consumer begins to connect meaning with the brand, the relationship develops. Successful marketing means moving consumers along the arc, to the point where they care about the brand and will even take action on its behalf. To accomplish this, marketers have to understand customers as people. Data based on group behavior won’t suffice.

“We’ll never build truly great, resonant brands if we don’t connect with people as individuals.”

This point applies to relationships with employees, too.

A brand operating system underpins the brand’s purpose and helps drive the company’s activities. A brand operating system rests on an internal belief – such as the belief at Nike that every person, by virtue of having a body, is an athlete. The belief enables and brings coherence to the company’s foundational elements. It also translates into meaning for customers. To build that belief within the organization, leaders need to see employees as people – not just performance data points – and treat them with humanity and humility. Only then will leaders be able to communicate persuasively about the organization’s vision and purpose.