Orchestrating a data symphony to deliver the best outcomes for brands & customers

One of Accenture Song’s 2024 Life Trends suggests that customer experience must rise back up the priority list as a route to growth. “You bring love to the customer by working with what they love,” says Laura Chaibi, director, international ad marketing & insights, Roku. That’s where brands have an opportunity to use data in powerful ways to bring back customer obsession.

This requires careful orchestration to “bring all the parts of technology, creativity and different data sources into one symphony,” says Ana Madrid, data scientist lead in intelligence, Accenture Song. “When you bring it together, that’s where you’re going to have the best outcomes.”

Data is a fundamental building block for any business to be able to understand its customers, but marketers don’t always have access to the right infrastructure or the right people. Businesses are at different stages of data maturity. Some are crawling (getting their house in order), others walking (starting to work with multiple data sources within their own business) and then there are those who are running (have the interoperability to work with sources outside their business).

“If the DNA of the business is not attuned to working with data, you really need to understand where you are in this evolution,” says Chaibi. “It used to be that one data point was enough to have a really good data fusion; now with generative AI, where you are working with 200 data points that you’re fusing together to make a narrative, that’s where the creativity is going to be.”

And there are so many mechanisms to be able to use data and use it for good in service of the customer, says Madrid: “When we’re thinking about data, we need to think about how we consume it and the technology that helps us to do so in a way without being overloaded.

“Be imaginative to really use that creativity, to embrace different types of data, to embrace different types of technology and use it for good to approach problems in a holistic way. And this is the time to do it, because it’s the only way we’re going to come up with better solutions.”

Moving forward, marketers will have to find a way to solve the tension between one to one and one to 100 and do both to create a symphony with data.

“Digital is algorithms, its fiber, it’s objective and we’re applying all of that rationality onto people who are emotional, who are made of carbon, who are analog and subjective,” says Chaibi. “You have water and oil, but there’s still massive possibilities. Think about the UX (digital) versus CX (real world) and how they are crashing together to solve problems in a new way.”

Watch part four ‘Front Row Seat: playing to your audience’ and catch up on previous episodes in this series, on The Drum TV.