MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Marketers Can Address Data Challenges to Drive Growth

  • 5m
  • Kimberly A. Whitler, Raj Venkatesan
  • MIT Sloan Management Review
  • 2021

Imagine that you have just been promoted to manager at a large food company and will be in charge of a popular candy brand primarily sold in grocery stores. The brand has been declining for some time, and you have to figure out the source of the decline and fix it. What do you do? If you’re like most marketers, you turn to readily available reports and market studies to find the answer. But is this the best approach?

Today’s marketers are more responsible than ever for leveraging their company’s data acquisition, integration, and analytical efforts to shape a better customer experience (CX). In fact, a recent McKinsey study found that 83% of global CEOs expect marketers to be a major driver for most or all of their company’s growth agenda. Despite marketing leaders’ increasingly important role in building analytical capability, many still struggle to effectively move beyond the conceptual goal of “delivering analytical value” to actually use analytics to drive growth. In the same McKinsey study, 23% of CEOs indicated they don’t believe their marketers are able to deliver on the growth agenda.

About the Author

Raj Venkatesan is the Ronald Trzcinski Professor of Business Administration at Darden. He is coauthor of Cutting-Edge Marketing Analytics (Pearson Education, 2014) and The AI Marketing Canvas (Stanford Business Books, 2021). More than 275,000 individuals have participated in his Coursera course on marketing analytics.

Kimberly A. Whitler is the Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, a former general manager and chief marketing officer, and author of Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value (Columbia University Press, 2021). Her articles for Forbes, where she is a senior contributor, have garnered over 4 million views.

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  • MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Marketers Can Address Data Challenges to Drive Growth