Much is talked about data and its transformative effect on, well everything. The profound impact of data is undisputable. But is that also the case in brand development?

We have all seen how data has also attached its tentacles to marketing and branding, but to date, it has been mostly in a rather mechanistic way.

Data in marketing is primarily used for analysing the effectiveness of marketing activity. As a result, we have become more agile. We continually optimize and try to understand what works and what doesn’t and react to it. As an extension we learn about peoples’ behaviour in our channels. We follow this by looking at our dashboards in Hubspot, Marketo or some other marketing automation system and we understand the impact of nurturing, how the funnel converts contacts to leads to MQL’s to … you know the drill.

Simply put, we use data to understand how a piece of content engages the audience and subsequently find out - are they interested in us?

Undoubtedly the analytics revolution has changed the face of marketing for good and in many respects, for the better. However, I would argue that the pendulum has swung too far towards the “marketing-is-mere-numbers” school of thought and deeper motivational understanding and exciting storylines have lost ground. This is about to change again.

The “analytics-only approach” has become the bread and butter of our industry, with every brand having marketing automation and analytics tools in place. It is effective, yes, but there is an adverse side-effect: brand stories are increasingly reduced to facts and skills at the expense of compelling storytelling. We are losing the emotion and excitement which is key to building lasting brand loyalty and connection.

As if that wasn’t enough there are new challenges on the horizon. Cookie consent rules are getting tighter and public awareness of privacy is acute. Simultaneously the big Social Media platforms who fuelled the analytics revolution are now under pressure to limit profiling. Cross-pollination of data is restricted, and it is hampering the ability to profile, all to the chagrin of us marketers.

Combine all this and differentiation and targeting becomes increasingly difficult. But could data be the answer to its own problem? Can there be more to data than basic analytics? Could data even lead to proactivity? The answer is yes. There is a next level, we just don’t see it much in marketing yet.

Design thinking as a philosophy and machine learning as a toolset is something the marketing community hasn’t really embraced yet.

Applying design thinking and trying to genuinely understand what drives behaviour is at the core. A qualitative study of a target group to discover new datapoints of their behavior gives potential for new insights. Capturing behaviours in the wider context of peoples every-day lives would enable better behavioural profiling and lead to more accurate suggestions. We would find trigger points to use for nudging them in the direction of the service offered or behaviour desired.