University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Data Driven
Book

Data Driven

Harnessing Data and AI to Reinvent Customer Engagement

Tom Chavez, Chris O'Hara and Vivek Vaidya
McGraw-Hill, 2018
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Co-authors Tom Chavez, Chris O’Hara and Vivek Vaidya bring extensive, hands-on knowledge to their comprehensive treatise on how technology can support marketing in the digital era. Their accessible prose lays out what marketing was, what it is becoming and how to harness what it can be. The authors share decades of experience working to create and integrate the technologies and processes they describe. Their easy, entertaining read serves as a blueprint for how companies can move from the world of slow legacy systems to the flexible integration of high-speed data. This guidance will help senior marketing, technology and corporate strategy executives understand how to market to customers “in the moment.”

Summary

The Digital Environment

In the digital age, people – especially millennials – eschew traditional channels of mass media. Yesterday’s methods for defining consumers no longer function profitably. The new digital environment calls for new ways to reach buyers and to gather and analyze data about them.

“Three Core Principles for Building a Winning Data Strategy”

Three guiding ideas mark the future of “data-driven marketing”:

  1. “Embrace the human becoming” – Traditional marketing mainstays like demographic segmentation of customers and the creation of personas were more valuable in the predigital age. With the influx of multiple devices and the data they generate, companies shouldn’t attempt to define customers by a linear method. Marketers need to recognize that today’s consumers don’t move in a straight line from awareness to craving to taking action. They exist – knowingly or not – in a continual state of change and uncertainty. A customer is no longer a human being – but more a “human becoming.” 
  2. You have both more and less...

About the Authors

Tom Chavez recently started a venture studio for creating new technology companies. He and Vivek Vaidya co-founded Krux, a company later acquired by Salesforce, where Vaidya is now CTO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Chris O’Hara heads global product marketing for the Salesforce data management platform.

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