The Analytical Marketer

The author led the transformation towards analytical marketing of the marketing department of the American enterprise SAS, specialized in business intelligence. She considers this transformation is still in progress, but already shares the lessons learnt from this project. She also considers practices implemented at Lenovo’s, Visa’s or the financial services firm Comerica.

She warns of the necessity to evolve marketing departments that are often structured by channel, to enable a more integrated vision of the relationship with prospects and clients. She encourages the development of tighter relations with the sales, finance and IT departments.

Another transformation domain: staff practices. Used to a culture of the development then the launch of campaigns, the staff must adopt a more proactive, analytical and agile culture. For example, they now have tools that enable them to adjust a campaign in real time according to the results observed. However, this requires that habits and reactions change.

Competencies also need to evolve, by recruiting and training analytical talents. Finally, even the role of the marketing managers changes: they increasingly become orchestra directors. Furthermore, as the return on investment of the marketing actions becomes easier to demonstrate, they can better justify their strategic role within the executive committees.

This pragmatic and transparent book sets the path ahead to transform the marketing department. It is a good starting point for a change management project. It however has the limitation that it relies upon a B2B enterprise experience and will be less relevant for the B2C actors.