Merry Christmas

A very merry Christmas to all of our readers and clients!

We’ll be back in 2010 with some news from our new projects.

We have also been thinking about how best to manage offers. January has traditionally been the time when retailers sell off excess Christmas stock, but there has been an interesting – if small - shift away from this in 2009. Some retailers are ordering in less stock due to lower expectations of consumer spending power. However, some are opening their online sales before Christmas to tap into the growth in online shopping.

Any offer campaign needs to be based on good data to be effectively targeted and may need special reporting to assess its success.

We hope to bring you more on offers and data strategy in the New Year but for now, enjoy the Christmas break!

James White,
Analyst


Analysis Marketing Ltd
blog@analysismarketing.com

Right-on Reporting

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. This is a phrase you should always bear in mind when you’re evaluating the performance of your business.

Far too often companies only have sight of top level data, so when the boss asks “Why are sales down 10% on forecast this week?” people are left to come up with their own pet theories - these usually involve blaming everyone and everything else from Postal Strikes and the Recession to the catering company, rather than the usual answer that the forecast was based on hope rather than fact.

The more detail you can break any activity down by, the better placed you will be to identify what’s causing the problem and solve it.

The key is to focus on what makes a material difference and not just on what is statistically significant.

I encountered a perfect example of this at a company where an agency was asked to come up with a ‘pen-portrait’ of a customer segment based on their profile compared to the base as a whole.

2% of this group had expressed an interest in Fitness compared to 0.5% among the rest of the base, so the agency’s illustration of this segment was of a man on a running machine. The information would have been invaluable if the company was in the Fitness industry (it wasn’t) but gave a misleading picture of the segment as 98% hadn’t expressed an interest in Fitness. The information was statistically significant, but a look over it would have confirmed that it didn’t reflect that segment as a whole.

Ultimately, track and report everything, but don’t sweat over the little things. However, if you don’t measure it at all you won’t be able to separate the truly important from the interesting but irrelevant.

Dig into the detail but know when to stop.

Dan Barnett,

Director

Analysis Marketing Ltd

blog@analysismarketing.com

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the new Analysis Marketing blog.

At Analysis Marketing, we’re all about helping you get more from your data. We provide database analysis, reporting, insight and database design. All of our work is intended to provide value, and make a difference to your understanding of your customers.

Our blog is also built around this ethos. We’ll offer advice, technical tips and examples that should help you get more out of the data you use every day, regardless of your role.

We will also use our blog to communicate news and to comment on recent projects and events.

A vibrant blog relies on interaction and opinion, so please don’t hesitate to comment on anything in our blog.

Each blog post will be uploaded to our LinkedIn profile and our web site where you’ll also be able to find out more about what we do.

We hope that you find our blog enjoyable and informative!

Dan Barnett,

Director

Analysis Marketing Ltd

blog@analysismarketing.com