Well it wasn't quite Vegas...

When Jim Sterne invited me to be a keynote speaker at the Marketing Analytics Summit in Las Vegas earlier in the year, I got very excited. First of all it had been a while since I’d been to one of Jim’s conferences, secondly it would give me a chance to talk about something I’m quite passionate about and thirdly it was in Las Vegas! The conference was in June, so as you can imagine things turned out a bit different!

The team from Rising Media scrambled (very successfully) to get the conference online and the format was changed to TED style talks with a Q&A afterwards. I thought it worked really well though it is an odd experience giving it your all presenting to your screen in your own home. It certainly wasn’t the Las Vegas experience I had been looking forward to.

However, I did get the opportunity to get my message across about the need to take a holistic approach to understand your customers and consumers and to look for opportunities to blend the world of behavioural analytics with research based insights to understand not just the what but also the why?

We all know about the increasingly digital world that we live in. The volume and velocity of data is rising exponentially as both humans and machines give off a continual digital exhaust which is captured, stored and processed. Compared to when I started working in analytics in the last millennium we have more behavioural data than I could have possibly have imagined back then. We also have the immense processing power and capabilities required to analyse this data, even my phone can process data millions of times faster than the first PC I ever used.

We live in a data rich environment and with ever increasingly granularity and precision we know what happened, we know when it happened, often we know who did it but often the big question remains why? Why did they do it? We go to great lengths to infer why people do things. We test, we analyse and we try to draw insight into why people do the things that they do.

And knowing why people do things is important because people do things for a reason. It may not be rational, it may not even be a conscious reason but how we feel, what we believe, what we’re motivated by influences our actions. At the end of the day our emotions drive our behaviours. People respond to a campaign for a reason, people give up in the checkout process for a reason, people buy, subscribe or adopt for a reason, be it frustration, aspiration, need or greed. We can see though pretty much everything that happens and we can react to that. We can send an email to an abandoned shopping cart, we can personalise offers based on previous transactions. Often this can be enough to evoke a reaction otherwise we wouldn’t do it, but wouldn’t it be more effective if we understood why people are making the choices they are making and use that insight to influence them towards a certain outcome?

So whilst I’m sure that we will continue to see how we can drive performance improvements through the use of all the digital, transactional and behavioural data our disposal, let’s not forget the human in all of this. When we didn’t have this data we used to ask people what they felt in order to understand what they might do. Today we know what they do, but perhaps not so much the reasons why. At the end of the day our emotions drive our behaviours and understanding why I do something is key to understanding how to keep me doing it.