Data, Marketing and Return On Outcome

By Des Viranna and Iggy Pintado

I met up with friend and great thinker, Des Viranna recently. Des is a Partner at Deloitte in Sydney, Australia and is known for his passion for delivering customer outcomes that have driven success for customers and business. Here are his insights on Data, Marketing and Return on Outcome.

There is a lot of discussion about ROI right now due to many factors. There’s a paradigm shift in customer sentiment, a privacy first approach, ever evolving regulation, deprecation of the third-party cookie and the emergence of the ZPD concept – Zero Party Data!

People are thinking more about their data and governments are thinking more about data security, privacy and… data sharing. With all this swirling around, there is (or should be) focus on how to shift marketing strategy.

Marketing strategy and ROI have often been frenemies.

ROI does not always tell the full story, and, truth be told, marketers don’t always think enough about ROI and meaningful measurement. ROI is typically a measure of the financial success of the activity in question, a campaign, treatment, activation, influence, event.

In marketing’s defence, they do almost always think about the outcome in a fair amount of detail. The challenge is that the outcome is often subjective or intangible, especially early in the customer decision pathway and particularly for difficult buying decisions.

There is a lot of confusion for the customer and noise in the system. We are constantly bombarded with ads, wherever we go, whatever medium, channel, or platform.

This is where Return On Outcome should come into play.

Return on Outcome provides marketers with the ability to create insights that will allow them to create structure in the customer buying process and ultimately, strategic competitive advantage for their organisation.

How can this be done? The market has been talking about paradigm shifts since the early 2000s and of course, “unprecedented” events for the last 2 years. Whatever structure we put in now needs to be able to change at short notice. How?

• Firstly, a thorough understanding of the outcomes that you are after.

• Second, a mindset that is inquisitive, open to change and reduces the frustration and danger that comes with failure. Test, learn, optimise, repeat!

• Third, a method to put structure to the unstructured. Ask for help if you are not sure where to start. Someone in your analytics team would be a good start. A tip for these initial conversations… iterate. Keep asking questions and go through the briefing process together.

Finally, a plan to capture the data required to give you timely, accurate and consistent insights to make your decision and the willingness to stop activities you may have always done in favour of something new.