Focus on data your business cares about

One more thing to do before you just rush off and put a value on data is to align against the business. You’ve got to look at where your business is going, what its objectives are and then align your work against that so that you’re delivering values for the data that matters.

Where should McDonald’s focus its data efforts?

So here we’ll take McDonald’s as an example of how we could go about doing this without access to strategic decision-makers. What we’re going to do is take a quick look at their 2020 annual report.

If you go and do this for your organisation, you’ll start to see beneath the covers that the strategies actually laid out and we can start to look at this. So they’ve got an accelerating the Arches strategic plan. It lays out the purpose and their mission. It lays out the values of the business and how people should behave in executing this strategy.

But then it’s got the 3 growth pillars that they want to go after: Maximising their marketing, Committing to the core and Doubling down on the 3D’s. And that’s where we’re going to focus our attention to make sure that we can deliver data that support these ambitions and that we can monetise the data that’s going to support these ambitions, too. 

So as a quick reminder, McDonald’s has these three growth pillars maximising their marketing, committing to the core and doubling down on the 3D’s.

How can data support business ambition?

And it’s on us to try and work out how data can be used to either help grow these strategic priorities or mitigate risks that might exist within them.

So McDonald’s want to use data to maximise their marketing.

And you can see here, they say they spend $4 billion a year on marketing, so there’s a huge amount of money there, and any efficiency gains would be extremely useful. And they’re going to raise their creative ambition and capitalise on these new digital behaviours to be able to get a better connection with customers and drive growth.

That’s all well and good. So how does that work?

Decisions

Well, we start to look at decisions that need to be made around this, and that could be a decision on which agency partner that they should build better relationships with or which customer segments we might be trying to deepen a connection with.

Costs

There’s $4 billion a year being spent on marketing. We want to cut costs and stop doing ineffective campaigns, and data can help us focus our attention on the areas where we’re going to get the biggest bang for our buck.

Customers

Clearly, customers here, it’s deepening that connection with their customers. So what are those customers wanting to know and feel and what can we put into our campaigns and how can data guide that?

Opportunities

They say the evolving digital behaviours, there are new channels potentially that we can look at and we need to provide different data to those channels, but also consistent data in alignment with what they expect from any other channel McDonald’s would be providing.

Risks

We’ve got to cut out risks. Now in this instance here, there’s not a lot of risks, but I suppose we could have a bad marketing campaign that might go down like a lead balloon. It might cause people to turn off from McDonald’s and want to go and use other providers.

Innovation

You could innovate, so how can they use data here to create something new? How can they go and take data from outside the organisation and look at other campaigns that different organisations have successfully run and maybe pivot into those with their own marketing?

Monetisation

How can they monetise their data here? Well, obviously the agencies themselves are charging a lot of money – four billion dollars for marketing to McDonald’s, but McDonald’s has got a huge amount of customer data. So could they set up a system where they shared some of their data on their customers with an agency partner, potentially for a discount against the campaign that’s going to be created?

Employees

Their employees, well, have marketing professionals here that are working with these agency partners. How can they capture what’s working in different parts of their business? Perhaps different geographies? Get their employees to capture that information and then share it with other teams elsewhere and be able to make better marketing globally.

Efficiency

And obviously, efficiency gains here in the same vein as the cost control. We know that we’ve got $4 billion here and we want to make sure that our marketing is as efficient as possible. When we create new campaigns, we can look at the various steps and sequences that need to be gone through by our employees to drive up efficiency by measuring the performance of different teams globally.

Use the annual report to align your work

As those of you that took the data strategy course will know, it’s not always easy to get into those strategic decisions and understand the direction of the business. So we’ve put this together to help you look at your annual reports and use that to prioritise your own work. This is going to make it much easier for you to get enthusiasm and excitement from your management if you’re valuing data that they care about.

Now, business cases get a bad rap in most firms, and just like data strategies, I don’t think many people really know what goes into one. In some firms, what passes for a business case would be laughed right out of the door in others. And I’ve seen board papers that are 8 pages long that command millions of dollars in investment. This isn’t good enough.

Even worse is when organisations have got funding and they just want to get on with it. They want to start doing without planning what they’re going to do with their funding. This is the recipe and road to ruin.

Whatever you choose to call it, whether it’s a business case, whether it’s a business plan or whether it’s just value proposition design, we need it for 4 key reasons

• The first is that we’ve got to prioritise your work, ideally aligning it against what the business wants.
• The second is for us to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, what is the value that we’re looking to unlock.
• Thirdly, we want to ensure that we’ve captured key KPIs and other metrics that will help us know that we are making progress and that we are achieving our goals to justify continued investment.
• Lastly, it’s so that we know where to begin.