At the recent Marketing Week Live event, AEG Europe’s executive VP of marketing Kimberly Kriss, stated that marketers need to adopt a more data led approach to their work, adding that “science needs bringing back to marketing”.  Kriss even suggested rebranding CMOs as ‘chief cognitive officers’ such was the desire to adopt a more academic approach to the marketer’s craft.

Whilst a change of job title may not be of high importance, the key message for retailers is to understand the value of their data, interpreting the information and using it to make informed decisions to increase business profitability.

This is a topic we recently explored with Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon and now head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford University.

Andreas’ view is that: “Many retail organisations have created a Chief Scientist role. This role reverses the scientific method by focusing on asking questions rather than finding answers. Answers, like data, are commodities.  Being able to ask the right question is the creative element that will allow you to set your business apart.

But according to Andreas simply creating a new role or changing a title is not enough. “The scale of cultural change requisite to become a truly data-focused organisation must come from the CEO.  It’s a massive shift to make every employee customer-centric, and encourage them to all actively gather and use data to drive the business.”

The CEO has to introduce a programme of behavioural change where every decision and every meeting is led by data. It should be expected, and indeed demanded.  Early activities to get you going may include:  openly acknowledging data-led successes – where has money been made or saved?; cataloguing initiatives which are explicitly data-led (either new analysis of existing data or collecting new data); or explicitly gathering and sharing widely the data generated from every new product or service launch.”