ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.
Episode Synopsis "No great brand has ever been built on data"
Don't get me wrong - data, and by data I mean the analytics that drive your marketing decision making - needs to be a building block of your strategy. You need to be able to measure most of the things you are doing to understand if you're moving into the right direction. But don't fool yourself with vanity metrics. Early in my career, I used to take pride in the fact that the first thing I checked in the morning was my Google Analytics setup. Like some sort of looking glass, I would try to "let the data speak" to me. But that's of course not how it works. Data is a means of proving or disproving your direction in marketing. But it doesn't replace building an actual connection with your customers. It's en vogue to say that we are data-driven. But when data replaces common sense, you're on the wrong track. Data is reactive. Marketing is pro-active. Zalando and Booking.com are often mentioned as the European flagships that grew through performance marketing. But while Booking is nowadays known for shady tricks to get you to buy something, Zalando´s success is actually largely based on the brand they built, and performance marketing wasn't the driving factor behind that. I want you to picture a local ice cream stand, just like the one you might have in your neighborhood. If you'd want to start one of these ice cream stands, you might start with analyzing the most frequented streets. The most busy areas. And then you would build a business that benefits from these busy streets. That is how you would build an ice cream stand just like most businesses do marketing online. The alternative would be an ice cream stand that focuses on being different. Maybe it's because they have extremely large cones, or because they use a lot of sparkles, or because their products are incredibly instagrammable. The first variant of our ice cream stand is the generic one you have in every city. The second one is the talk of the town that tourists flock to, even if it is a bit out of the way. Of course ice cream stand number two needs to add sound data to their offering at some point. But instead of an incremental improvement, like the data-driven ice cream stand, the instagrammable one is a qualitative leap that focuses on creating a different customer experience. That brand allows you to build so much more of a deep connection with your audience, and if you've come so far, the sky is really the limit.
In God we trust