Like so many others in a leadership role, there have been moments in her career when Adele Sweetwood would have liked to find answers to tough questions in a book. The difference in her case is that she’s now written a book to help others do so, at least when they’re struggling with marketing analytics.
Sweetwood, the senior vice-president of marketing at Cary, N.C.-based SAS, is the author of the recently-published The Analytical Marketer: How To Transform Your Marketing Organization. Sweetwood walks through some of the biggest changes companies need to prepare for as they try to make strategic use of their data. This includes rethinking the customer journey, adopting an analytical mind set, realigning structure, building the right talent/skills and leading an analytics-driven organization.
“The level of sophistication of our customers has changed so much,” Sweetwood told Marketing by phone. “They’re getting so much better at the social world and digital world because of their personal lives. So when you try to engage with them in the digital world, it’s being driven by a different set of expectations.”
Sweetwood’s book has a forward from Tom Davenport, the professor and author of a well-known book of his own (with Jeanne G. Harris) called Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, which set the scene for what companies could do with data. A lot has changed in the nearly 10 years since the book was published, Sweetwood said, particularly in how analytics has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.
“Competing on Analytics got noteriaty because it started to simplify the ideas of what this could do for everyone. Now I thnk it’s the new type of marketing organization, and it’s going to be that way for a while,” she said.
Usually brands falter with analytics in part because CMOs and those helping them lead the charge discover they haven’t been great stewards of data for many years. Email databases could be poorly organized, for example, or information in sales areas aren’t well integrated with what the marketing team needs. Sweetwood, however, isn’t as quick to point the finger at CIOs and IT departments as other have. She suggested marketers need to be proactive in building a coalition of internal stakeholders who recognize the value of data management and driving change from there.
“It’s easier to blame IT when the data is bad than to take ownership and accountability yourself,” she said. “We were our own worst enemies in getting the right information and getting it appropriately.”
Analytics might also seem like more of a priority for B2B organizations than those using TV commercials or out-of-home ads to reach consumers, but Sweetwood suggested effective use of data would lead to improved management of inventory and merchandizing for retailers, among other benefits.
“There’s enough similarity that the same person that’s buying shoes from Zappos or a shirt at Macy’s, is also potentially buying software or services or hardware,” she said. “The way they interact with us digitally can be the same. The differences are in the things you might pay attenion to.”
While Sweetwood delved deep into how paying attention to certain details would require new skills — and even offered some sample job descriptions in the back of her book — she isn’t necessarily making the case for new titles.
“I’ve heard about the chief marketing technologist, the chief data officer,” she admitted. “Possibly we’re confusing things a little bit. We don’t have that many different marketing oriented chiefs [at SAS.] I think there are too many Cs.”
