Most Marketers Still Ground Strategies On Hunches And Experience – IBM

Just 23% of businesses believe that they manage big data successfully enough to discover meaningful insights which can bring extra value to their business, according to the results of a survey from service provider IBM.

IBM polled 358 marketing professionals across Australia, Canada, India, the UK and US and established that 25% of firms consider that their marketing techniques are “highly effective” in identifying and entering new markets and 32% described their organisations as strongly capable of engaging with individual consumers.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of marketers anticipate that by 2015 return on investment (ROI) will become their chief measure to assess effectiveness. This suggests that marketers should look for more coherent and precise tools to collect and analyse data and use such information to achieve better business results, IBM noted.

In its report, IBM labelled just 23% of organisations as “marketing scientists,” or those businesses considered by the researcher as capable of making best use of analytics to drive actions beyond marketing and sales. Another 37% were defined as “”constrained analytics,” i.e. firms that have limited strength when it comes to utilising analytics and using data in a prescriptive way, or businesses with a broadly internal scope. Around 40% of firms were assigned to the “traditional marketers” group and were defined as companies relying on analytics but lacking skills to generate insights to drive a material broad-scale change.

More than one in eight traditional marketers continue to base their strategies on hunches and experience. In contrast, half of “marketing scientists” now use insights to decide on how to engage consumers, while 49% base their decisions on data. Another 47% of “marketing scientists” communicate information with the rest of the enterprise when implementing actions based on their findings.