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It’s the season of giving and philanthropy, for a variety of reasons, so we’re showcasing what some of Canada’s biggest marketers are doing this year to pitch in and help our nation’s charities, nonprofits and community organizations. It’s a marketer’s wonderland. McDonald’s Canada Forecasts a Flurry of Gratitude This Holiday Season. McDonald’s launched its Season of Giving, a series of meaningful moments to thank the people and organizations that help drive impact in the communities they serve across Canada. McDonald’s Canada and its independent franchisees are proud to feed and foster the communities they serve. This program includes a series of moments that spotlights and shows appreciation for the local organizations, guests and franchisees, who put in the effort to help make meaningful impact in their communities that goes beyond the restaurants. McDonald’s Canada and its independent franchisees are helping host the Season of Giving from British Columbia, Yukon, Ontario and Quebec to Nova Scotia, building on the strong connections many restaurants have with local organizations that address specific community needs, like running local food drives to gather non-perishable supplies for local Food Banks Canada locations and bringing wellness supplies and lunches to Ronald McDonald House Charities® (RMHC®) across the country. McDonald’s became part of Canada’s community since the first restaurant opened in 1967 and is committed to continue helping people in Canada with meaningful partnerships and programs. Through its partnership with Food Banks Canada, McDonald’s Canada and its independent franchisees will donate 500,000 meals to Canadians in need this holiday season. “Over a million guests come through our doors every day, not just for the food, but because of shared community connections,” said Michele Boudria, President and CEO, McDonald’s Canada. “It’s about so much
more than a burger to us. It’s about feeding and fostering community, and for us and our independent franchisees, that means supporting programs and initiatives that care for Canadian families in need, help reduce food insecurity and help in times of need.” McDonald’s Canada is also the founding and forever partner of Ronald McDonald House Charities® Canada (RMHC®) and is committed to supporting families with sick children. “Whether through supporting the local Ronald McDonald House, seasonal food drives and donations, or any number of other programs, our independent franchisees are truly part of the fabric of the communities they serve 365 days a year,” said Gemma Hinksman, Senior Director, Canada Impact Team, McDonald’s Canada. “The Season of Giving shines a spotlight on this great work and every member of our communities who helps make it happen, with the hopes of inspiring even more impact.” ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
To mark the season of giving, Hasbro Canada has donated 5,000 French SCRABBLE Board Games valued at more than $140,000 to the Montreal Community Cares Foundation’s ‘Cares and Shares’ Holiday Program. “Hasbro is honoured to partner with a non-profit organization such as Montreal Community Cares Foundation to spread joy to children and families in underserved communities during the holiday season,” said Greg Ferguson, Vice President of Marketing for Hasbro Canada. “By donating these Games, Hasbro is helping to foster learning, growth, and positive memories. Hasbro classic games such as SCRABBLE, MONOPOLY, and CLUE not only bring families and friends together for fun and meaningful social interaction – they also reinforce educational benefits such as literacy, math, and problem-solving skills.” “We are extremely grateful for Hasbro’s donation to Montreal Community Cares Foundation,” said Lorie Geddes-Reid, Program Director for Montreal Community Cares Foundation. “The donation of these game will be distributed to youth in local schools and community centers across the Island of Montreal, allowing us to continue in our mission to build resilient youth through the power of sports, education, and community.” Hasbro has a long and proud history of giving back to our community and supporting those in need through various philanthropic initiatives such as financial support, donations of toys and games, and employee volunteering. We are guided by our philanthropic mission to empower generations of storytellers, create sustainable impact, and spark joy through play.
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Pollard Banknote Limited joined in on the 2023 Gift Responsibly Campaign, combining with lotteries and organizations across North America and around the world to raise awareness about the risks of underage gambling. The campaign is organized by the National Council on Problem Gambling and the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviours at McGill University. As a proven partner to lotteries worldwide, Pollard Banknote is committed to helping its lottery and charitable gaming customers grow revenue for good causes in a socially responsible manner. Drawing on its extensive lottery experience and leadership in the industry, Pollard Banknote understands that supporting responsible gaming requires a complete ecosystem that involves education, knowledgeable and aware lottery teams, a communications plan, and tools to enable lotteries to promote a positive play experience, including by preventing underage gambling. Responsible gaming policies and practices are inherent across all aspects of Pollard Banknote’s business — from the careful design of instant scratch tickets to appeal strictly to adults, to the tools and safeguards embedded as core components of its digital solutions — ensuring that Pollard Banknote’s products uphold the highest standards of quality, fairness, and safety. As a testament to its ongoing commitment to responsible gaming, Pollard Banknote holds an Associate Member World Lottery Association (“WLA”) Responsible Gaming certification. “Pollard Banknote is proud to be involved in the Gift Responsibly Campaign this year,” said Doug Pollard, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Pollard Banknote. “We pride ourselves on being a socially responsible company, and we collaborate with NCPG, the WLA, and lotteries around the world to infuse positive change into our communities. During the upcoming holiday season and all year round, we are continually working with our lottery partners to promote safe and responsible gaming practices.” “The potential long-term risks associated with underage gambling exposure cannot be understated,” said Keith Whyte, NCPG Executive Director. “I commend each Gift Responsibly Campaign participant for their commitment to raising awareness about the risks of youth gambling. Now, more than ever, we must continue to insist that lottery tickets are never appropriate gifts for children.” The Gift Responsibly Campaign began in November and runs through the end of December, with participating lotteries and organizations engaging in public awareness activities. The campaign is endorsed by the North American Association of State and
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Provincial Lotteries (“NASPL”), the WLA, and European Lotteries. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
focus on appearance over ability harms girls’ body confidence. As the biggest champion of self-esteem for girls globally since 2004, we are thrilled to return to the Big Game and use this massive stage to drive meaningful awareness for this important issue and help girls stay in sports.” Dove and Nike have commissioned this survey to expose the reality of girls’ experience in sports and the impact it has on their confidence, as well as the drivers behind girls dropping out and potential solutions. They asked 4,917 children of different ages, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and US to take part in a 15-minute online survey. The study included 3,506 girls aged between 9-17 years old (approximately 500 from each country) and 1,391 boys aged 9-17 years old (approximately 200 from each country) who had the consent of a parent or legal guardian to take part. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Beauty brand Dove is officially announcing it is back in the Big Game with a :30-second TV commercial, which will premiere in the first quarter of football’s biggest night. After making its mark in 2006 with a Game Day ad surrounding the importance of boosting self-esteem in young girls, Dove will return with a similar focus: a message about promoting body confidence in girls to keep them playing the sports they love. Dove is the largest self-esteem education provider in the world through the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which has reached more than 100 million young people with no-cost tools and resources since its inception in 2004, and is on track to reach 250 million young lives by 2030. Building on its commitment to selfesteem, Dove co-commissioned research to understand the impact of body dissatisfaction on girls in sports. After finding that 45 percent of teenage girls globally drop out of sports due to low body confidence, Dove and Nike partnered to create Body Confident Sport — a first-of-its-kind and scientifically-proven set of coaching tools to build body confidence in 11-17-year-old girls — which will support the new Game Day message. “Dove is on a mission to make sports a place where all girls can thrive and feel like they belong,” said Leandro Barreto, Senior Vice President, Global Dove Masterbrand. “The prevalence of negative body talk in sports and ❱ DMN.CA
the west coast to the vast boreal forests of the North. I strived to capture the essence of Canadian landscapes and cultures in my art. My hope is that my work will inspire viewers to engage with the world around them in new and meaningful ways, and to appreciate the beauty and diversity of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage.” The Coffee Styles Collection artwork is already hanging in some Tims restaurants across Canada and will be added to more locations over time. “Tim Hortons restaurants are designed to be a welcoming home-away-from-home for our guests with design elements that celebrate our beautiful country,” said Brian Noviski, Vice President of Architecture and Design for Tim Hortons. Wu has also partnered with Tim Hortons to create a mural about Tim Hortons Foundation Camps which will start appearing in Tims restaurants next year. Av Wu Design (Avril Wu) gained recognition for her playful, colourful illustrations often seen on murals on the streets of Toronto and food/beverage packaging. Born in Malaysia and raised in Toronto, Av is most influenced by the breathtaking landscapes and cultures she’s encountered throughout her travels around the world. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Grand Challenges Canada receives USD $10M grant from the LEGO Foundation. Tim Hortons partners with Toronto artist Av Wu on artwork collection showcase. Tim Hortons is proud to be collaborating with Toronto artist Av Wu on a new collection of vibrant artwork that will be proudly displayed in thousands of Tims restaurants across the country. Wu’s Coffee Styles Collection is a series of 10 vibrant pieces that are inspired by the unique beauty of Canada and all the special everyday moments that Canadians enjoy with Tims. Based on a series of preliminary works by Toronto artist Christina Ott, the various pieces in the Coffee Styles Collection depict Canadian pastimes in the great outdoors such as skiing, canoeing and enjoying sunsets, along with scenes of Canada’s natural beauty including the Rocky Mountains and the crystal waters of the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario. “I’m so proud to be working with Tim Hortons on the Coffee Styles Collection, to know my work will eventually be hung in thousands of Tims restaurants across Canada and seen by millions of people is so incredible,” said Wu. “I took inspiration from the natural beauty and cultural richness of Canada for this collection. My work reflects my deep appreciation for the country’s diverse landscapes, from the rugged mountains of
The LEGO Foundation has announced a USD $10M grant to Grand Challenges Canada to support Inclusive Learning in Crisis Settings, a new humanitarian grand challenge focused on supporting locally-led innovations for early childhood development and education in emergency settings. The announcement was made at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, the world’s largest gathering on refugees. The program will draw on the insights and resources of two key portfolios at Grand Challenges Canada: Saving Brains and Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge. Since the launch of Saving Brains in 2011, several simultaneous economic, geopolitical, health and environmental shocks — a ‘polycrisis’ — have impacted child development, wellbeing, and future prospects. UNICEF estimates indicate that the need for humanitarian assistance has doubled in the last five years and increased fivefold since 2013. More than 400 million children are currently living in areas of conflict and an estimated 1 billion children are living in areas of significant vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Inclusive Learning in Crisis Settings will support locally-led, systems-focused innovations that provide quality early child development and education programs and DECEMBER 2023
// 7 services for children in Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, and Uganda, which are all hosting a large number of refugee and displaced children and their families. Funds from the LEGO Foundation grant will be used to award nine seed projects with an average of CAD $250,000 each to develop, test, and refine their innovations. The funds will also be used to provide approximately CAD $300,000 – $1,500,000 in transition-to-scale funding of up to seven proven innovations to ensure the most promising interventions reach large numbers of children in need. “We are thrilled to be forging this partnership with the LEGO Foundation that brings the best of our Savings Brains and Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge initiatives together to establish Inclusive Learning in Crisis Settings,” said Dr. Fawad Akbari, the Director of Humanitarian Innovation at Grand Challenges Canada. “Through this program, we will identify, fund and nurture locally led, inclusive early child development in emergency and conflict settings to address the ‘polycrisis’ that children, their families, caregivers, and communities face. Through the lessons from this program, we hope to inform and influence the child development ecosystem as a whole. We invite other partners to join us and grow it to a global initiative.” “For over a decade, Grand Challenges Canada has supported locally-led innovation focused on healthy early childhoods through our Saving Brains portfolio of investments. Amid staggering increases in the need for humanitarian assistance in the last five years, it is imperative that we invest in supporting children in crisis settings,” said Dr. Karlee Silver, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada. “We are grateful to the LEGO Foundation for their investment and their commitment to improving the lives of children.” Grand Challenges Canada is dedicated to supporting Bold Ideas with Big Impact®. Funded by the Government of Canada and other partners, Grand Challenges Canada funds innovators in low- and middle-income countries and Canada. The bold ideas Grand Challenges Canada supports integrate science and technology, social and business innovation — known as Integrated Innovation®. The LEGO Foundation shares the mission of the LEGO Group: to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Indie agency FUSE Create looks to help alleviate Toronto’s housing crisis this holiday season with their Gingerbread House listing. The cost of housing in Toronto is through the roof; home prices have climbed almost 30 percent in the last four years, making home DECEMBER 2023
ownership virtually impossible for many. In fact, just recently, Toronto placed 7th on the 2023 UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index, with the average Ontarian needing to save for almost 20 years to make a down payment on a home. And during the holiday season, this out-of-reach housing market hits particularly…home. So, this holiday season, FUSE Create is raising awareness — and funds — for exactly this problem with the “Gingerbread House-ing Crisis.” The agency built a 1:1 scale model of a typical Toronto home entirely of gingerbread. This “home”, measuring 1 sq. ft. in total area, is listed on real estate sites for exactly $1,000; the average price of one-square-foot of Toronto real estate. “Gingerbread houses connote feelings of warmth and comfort — something a lot of people are struggling to find in this city’s housing market,” says Linda Carte, Creative Director at FUSE Create. “Taking such a well-known holiday symbol and using it to illustrate the reality of 2023 is a stark commentary on where this city and country are struggling. We want to support the innovation that Mainstay Housing is incubating for future homeowners.” The house was built by local artisanal pastry shop Bobbette & Belle and is currently listed on Kijiji’s real estate pages and FC Realty’s social pages. It is also in the window of FUSE’s office on 45 Ossington Avenue. The agency is encouraging visitors to donate to Mainstay Housing, a non-profit agency committed to building affordable, stable, and inclusive communities. Based in Toronto, Canada, FUSE Create (fusecreate.com) is a full-service independent creative agency that believes when you fuse smarts + imagination, whether in a campaign, a culture, a process, or a person, everything is possible. And that belief creates, invents, and permeates throughout the agency and the award-winning work, that aims to do one thing; Turn Heads. FUSE Create earned the #3 Small Agency spot in Canada in 2021 and is a member of Worldwide Partners (worldwidepartners. com), one of the world’s largest networks of independent advertising agencies. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Finally, this isn’t about corporate philanthropy or donations or social programs. But we had to note the marketing significance of the news.
Connor Bedard and CIBC team up in new partnership. CIBC is teaming up with professional hockey player Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks, as an ambassador and spokesperson for the bank. Connor is a longtime CIBC client, and this partnership is a proud next step that will allow him to focus on his career ambitions while our CIBC team supports him in realizing his goals off the ice. “We’re excited to welcome Connor to the CIBC team today as we officially move forward in this new, long-term partnership,” said Stephen Forbes, Executive Vice-President, Purpose, Brand and Corporate Affairs, CIBC. “Already an accomplished athlete at the age of 18, Connor has his career ahead of him. His story and voice will demonstrate how the CIBC team can deliver the right plans to help our clients reach their ambitions.”
“My family are long-time clients of CIBC, they are the first and only bank I’ve used since growing up in Vancouver,” said Connor Bedard. “As our family’s bank, CIBC has always been there behind the scenes to support my early ambitions in hockey, and my move to Chicago. As I grow my career, I’m excited to take this next step as an ambassador for the bank that’s been there for me throughout my journey so far.” As an ambassador for the bank, Connor will be working alongside CIBC off the ice, through initiatives that highlight community giving and helping others reach their ambitions such as CIBC Miracle Day, an annual fundraising tradition that has raised nearly $300 million globally in support of children’s charities. Team CIBC looks forward to partnering with Connor, as well as continuing to work with the Chicago Blackhawks, to create further positive impact on the Chicagoland area and fans of the team. “Across our bank, we’re focused on building strong, long-lasting relationships and we’re excited to partner with Connor as we continue to invest and grow our business in the U.S.,” said Shawn Beber, Senior Executive Vice-President and Group Head, U.S. Region; President and CEO, CIBC Bank USA. “Chicago serves as an important connection between CIBC and Connor as we work closely together to create greater access to opportunities for all in the communities where we live and work.” DMN.CA ❰
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INTERVIEW
Values-Based Segmentation: An Interview with David Allison, CEO, Valuegraphics BY STEPHEN SHAW
T STEPHEN SHAW is the Chief Strategy Officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering a more unified customer experience. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca
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he legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt once wrote that, “If you’re not thinking segments, you’re not thinking”. He added, “To think segments means to think beyond what’s obviously out there to see.” Levitt felt that segmentation was crucial because it sparked insight into how customers differ from one another. Knowing what drives the behaviour of different groups of customers leads to better marketing decisions, he believed, since business success is only possible through market differentiation. “The search for meaningful distinction is a central part of the marketing effort”, he declared. The trouble with segmentation, of course, is that it is hard to do. There is no “one size fits all” method of segmentation. There are many ways to segment, each method offering an answer to a different question. How similar are customers in their demographic profile? In their behaviour? In their interests and affinities? In their product preference and usage? In their lifestyle orientation? In their attitudes? It is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, pivoting the different sides to come up with the solution. Which is why most marketers do a lousy job of it. At best they default to the standard approach which is usually some mix of needs and usage segmentation — at worst they take the lazy way out and default to demographics. And even if they land on the right answer, marketers struggle to turn that insight into “meaningful distinction”. They make the mistake of using segmentation as merely a tactical tool, and then give up when they realize there is no way to target the segments through most marketing channels. Segmentation becomes just another check box in campaign development instead of what it is meant to be: a tool to drive strategy. Beyond wrestling with the complexity of segmentation, marketers struggle with truly understanding what drives customer behaviour. We may know what people look like — their preferences — where they live — perhaps what they like to do in their spare time — but then why they do they behave so differently even when everything we know about them is the same? How often do we see people of identical age, income, lifestyle and ethnicity make diametrically opposite choices? That was the puzzle social psychology and behavioural science were supposed to answer. Yet even when behavioural tendencies and biases are revealed, they can be difficult to act upon. The insight becomes a “nice to know” instead of an “aha” moment — just another snippet of information in a persona profile.
What truly explains the decisions people make and the actions they take, according to Valuegraphics CEO David Allison, are their values: the modes of conduct they deem to be personally or socially preferable — the principles by which they live — the beliefs ingrained in them, usually from very early on in life, a function of the social and cultural forces around them. People act in accordance with those values, whether subliminally or not, even when it comes to their favourite brands. They are drawn to others who share their belief system. Values drive much of human behaviour, in fact, and can explain many of the choices that people make. And today, more than ever, people will choose brands based on the perception of shared values. Values become the tiebreaker. If as marketers you understand what is important to customers, what motivates them, what is truly meaningful to them, you have a much better chance of relating to them, both as individuals and as part of a “target” audience. After all, a major goal of marketing these days is making meaningful connections with customers. David makes the case for values-driven segmentation in his newest book “The Death of Demographics” in which he argues that marketers should talk to customers about what they think is important. His company has created a massive global database of values, the first of its kind, which marketers can use to determine the values of their customers. Stephen Shaw: In 2015 you had an epiphany: you realized that demographics were not the best way for marketers to look at the world. Can you share that story? David Allison: My agency at the time was focused on real estate development — condos, resorts, office towers — we did this all over the world. We were quite good at it. And as with any business, you always ask yourself, “Who’s our customer?”. As marketers we have two traditional ways of doing that: demographics — male, female, rich, poor, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, whatever; and then this whole bunch of other stuff that falls into the category of psychographics, which is everything else we know about them — past sales behavior, likes, preferences, wants, desires, needs, interests, etc. In real estate, inevitably, you’re targeting an aging baby boomer who’s trying to downsize from a singlefamily home in the suburbs and move into a stacked urban environment. At my company we just called them “Bob and Sally”. Based on what we knew, we had a different kind of “Bob and Sally” for one tower versus another tower, but basically it was always “Bob and DECEMBER 2023
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INTERVIEW Sally” because they had the money. That’s who we were building condos for. So then you’d go and try to sell out all the units. The neat thing about the real estate development industry from a marketing perspective is it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So we define an audience, spend some money, talk to those folks, and then about three years later, you’re standing in a room with them. What kept happening to me over and over again at these ribbon cutting ceremonies with the shrimp on a stick and the cheap glass of Prosecco that we called champagne was this moment where I’d say, “Who are you people? Because you’re not the target audience we thought we were talking to.” Maybe 10 percent or 15 percent of the people in the room were. But there was all these other people who had no resemblance whatsoever to them. We didn’t target them. We didn’t think about them in our strategies. We didn’t craft messages for them, and yet, here they were. So when I sold my company I said, “I’m going to see if I can solve this.” So that takes you really quickly into behavioral science. How do humans decide things? And you start looking at psychology, sociology, psychiatry, even neurology. They all have different theories about how people make decisions. But they agree on one central principle: human values drive every decision. So that was the eureka moment. If we could just understand the values of a group of people before we spend a million dollars talking to them, then we would know what we needed to say so that we could drive their decisions in the way we’d like them to go. In retrospect, looking back on those rooms full of people, they weren’t dissimilar at all. On the outside they may have looked different demographically. But since values drive all decisions, they were all in the room because their values had attracted them there. So I thought, okay, let’s see if we can profile groups of people and understand their shared values, then we’d know how to talk to them and get them to do the things we’d like them to do. Shaw: Emotions are understood to drive 50 percent of all decision making. Are emotions and values two sides of the same coin? Allison: What’s driving emotions is values. You’re going to be happy when you find something that aligns with your values. You’re going to be sad when something happens that doesn’t align with your values. You’ll be angry if something is directly threatening your values or how you see your place in the world. So emotions, decisions, behaviors, reactions, everything about who you are as a human, at its core, begins with your values. It’s the base level DNA for who we are. Emotions are part of the equation but emotions are a derivative of values, and they change. Demographics change. DECEMBER 2023
You wake up tomorrow, you’re not 18 to 24 anymore, you’re 25 to 36 now. Suddenly you’re a whole new person because you’re in a different age category? Psychographics are all over the map. Values never change. Values are stable, and give you the best chance of understanding your target audience. Shaw: Can you provide an overview of the Valuegraphics system? Allison: It’s a system where you can use values as a way to position and frame up messages, campaigns, and strategies. As of today, we’ve done close to a million surveys around the world, long-form qualitative surveys with a team of translators in 152 different languages. We’re accurate in 180 countries out of about 186, last time I counted, and we’ve maintained a plus or minus 3.5 percent level of accuracy and 95 percent level of confidence. So what we’ve built is the world’s first global inventory of core human values. For the stats geeks out there, it’s a random stratified statistically representative sample of the population of these 180 countries - so it’s an exact replica of the real world in miniature. And by looking at that model of the world we can say, “Here’s the shared values of these people versus those people.” So let me give you a couple of quick stats. If you look at any of the typical demographic labels that we’re all familiar with — age, gender, income, marital status, number of kids — and ask, “How similar are the people inside any one of those cohorts?”. In other words, how targetable are they? On average, across all of those different cohorts around the world, people are about 10.5 percent similar. So how targetable is Gen Z? 10.5 percent. How targetable are boomers? 10.5 percent. People who make $250,000 a year? 10.5 percent. So flip that around, they’re 90 percent dissimilar. So when we talk to Gen Z there’s a 90 percent built-in fail rate. Now if you put people in groups based on values, they are similar to each other as much as 89 percent of the time. So that’s like saying you could spend 10-cent dollars using demographics to
David Allison, CEO, Valuegraphics
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INTERVIEW understand people, or you could spend 89-cent dollars using values. Shaw: You’ve created 56 different value clusters and 15 values archetypes. Explain the difference between a value cluster and an archetype. Allison: So we asked these million people about what they do, about their hobbies, their interests, the way they live their lives, what’s important to them. And then we saw patterns emerging: it turns out there were 56 different ways that people were talking about the things they do, the things that are important to them. But there’s more than 8,000 codes in the Valuegraphics database for those 56 values. So we use the 56 values and the 8,000 definitions for those in the hundreds and hundreds of profiles we’ve done around the world, and we’ve yet to see the same profile pop up more than once. Now the archetypes, they’re kind of a storytelling conceit. They’re a way for me to tell stories, and in the book we wanted to give people a tool that they could use to figure out the values of their target audience without having to hire us to do the work for them. We wanted to come up with the smallest number of groups possible. There’s 15 of them. In the book there’s a quiz. The responses will tell you which of 15 chapters in the book you should be paying attention to because your people are most like that archetype. But it’s pretty darn courageous to say, “There’s only 15 kinds of people in the world.” I sometimes say it’s like playing the piano with your fists. Shaw: Of those 15 values archetypes that you named, one group that you call out as being the most prevalent are “The Seekers”. What makes them unique? Allison: These are people who are just not quite sure where they are in their life. They’re always wondering, “Is this the right apartment for me? Is this the right spouse for me? Is this the right job for me?”. I tell a story in the book about people who go and look at open houses, not because they want to move, they’re just checking out other people’s lives, going, “Oh, if I had a banquette and I put it over on that side, maybe that would be the thing I’m looking for.” It’s a bit of a silly way of getting the point across, but the Seekers are just seeking something. They might not know what it is, but they are just not content with where they are. Shaw: So when you’re on the speaking circuit evangelizing around this concept, what kind of reaction do you get? Are people open to the idea or skeptical? Allison: Yeah, it’s funny. There’s often a moment when I’m speaking, after I’ve told a couple of stories, when the room goes silent. All the fidgeting has stopped. Everyone’s put down their phones. You can feel, “I got them. They’re here now.” That’s when people can recognize it in themselves and go, “Oh, my gosh. You’re right, that is how I make decisions”. Lee Iacocca ❱ DMN.CA
had this great quote where he said, “Business is nothing more than a bunch of human relationships.” And he hit the nail on the head. So if you understand people, you understand business, all aspects. And to understand people, you need to understand their values. Because values determine all your behaviors, decisions, and emotions. Shaw: There’s also a geodemographic system called lifestyle segmentation (1) — this idea that “birds of a feather flock together”, also called social clusters — made up of distinct groups of people with shared affinities and lifestyles who tend to live in the same neighborhood. How would you compare and contrast the two systems? Allison: The reason you can put people into a lifestyle group is because they have similar values. Do you want to focus on the cause or the effect? By looking at the values of a group of people — let’s make one up here, “Personal growth, ambition, and social standing” — and because of those three values, they are behaving like this. They’re thinking about these things. They’re going to make decisions like this. And so you’re going to use those three values to come up with an entire customer journey for them that rings those bells and pushes those buttons. And the beautiful thing about it is you don’t have to pay attention to anything else. You can talk to them about sustainability if you want but make it about their own ambition. Why should you be a sustainable consumer? Well, because it’s going to get you ahead in life. Shaw: Let’s consider the U.S. for a moment. You’ve certainly seen a migration movement there with people retreating into these enclaves of “like-mindedness” because they’re more comfortable being around people who share their world view. It’s been called by one sociologist “The Big Sort” (2). Is that what you’re seeing, this yearning to live in a neighborhood where you’re surrounded by people who don’t look at you as a moral adversary? Allison: Again, let’s just take a step back and have a look at that premise. The people who live in these gated communities in the United States, they look like each other on the outside. They smile and nod at each other. They’re wearing the same brands of clothing, but why? Some of them are doing it because of social standing. That’s the value that’s being activated by choosing to live that way. Others are doing it perhaps because of ambition. They want to meet the right people so they can get to the next level in their careers. Someone else might be doing it because of family. “I’m looking for a really good, safe place for my kids to grow up.” So you’re going to have a variety of different kinds of people inside that gated community. In a way, that gated community is the same as our opening conversation about the people who came and bought a condo back when I was doing
real estate marketing, right? They look like each other, sort of, but on the inside, that’s where the values are. That’s where it starts to make sense. We’re all being motivated by different things. Shaw: One of the things you point out in the book about the U.S. is that the number one value is belonging, and you say, “They see life as tribal.” That seems to explain a lot about the state of the U.S. today. Allison: Oh, my gosh. In the United States, the number one most important value, as you’ve said, is belonging. Second most important value is family. And in Canada, it’s the inverse, family is first, and then belonging. So, watching what’s been going on in the States with their political environment over the last few years, we hear stories all the time about an uncle and an aunt who aren’t invited to Thanksgiving dinner because they’re on Team Red instead of Team Blue. We have political disagreements here in Canada within families, but you don’t not invite them to Christmas dinner. Shaw: In your book you do split out the U.S., yet you lump in Canada with Mexico, which seems a little bit counterintuitive. What was your rationale for that? Allison: There are two countries in the world that have a dominant influence on their region. In North America that’s the U.S. of course. So we pulled them out and looked at them on their own. I wanted Canada to have its own region but logically it just didn’t make any sense. The other one is China. If we’d left China in there with all the rest of Asia, then the numbers that you’d see for Taiwan, and Singapore, and India would be incredibly skewed because of what China does to the data. Shaw: It’s not just countries that can have different values — isn’t it true of regions within a country too? Allison: Yeah, absolutely. So okay, let me tell you how we actually do this work. Say you’re a reading glass manufacturer and you’re interested in how you can get more customers. Demographically, we know there’s an age qualification. And let’s say these reading glasses are made out of solid platinum so they’re really expensive. So that means there’s going to be an income qualification. And they’re very, very wide because I have a giant head, so these are definitely for men. So we got rich men who are of a certain age — that’s our target audience for this particular style of reading glasses. So what we do is we go out and we find a statistically representative sample of people who meet that description and ask: “Are you interested in buying reading glasses in the next little while? What do you think of these ones? Do you think those are the best ones you’ve ever seen? Cool, do you mind if we ask a couple of questions?”. And we only need to ask them three, four, five questions. And it’s just enough that in the aggregate, when we’ve talked to DECEMBER 2023
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INTERVIEW 1,300 to 1,800 people who fit that description, we go into the benchmark study and pull out all the rich data profiles we have of people who match them. And then for that manufacturer, we say, “All right, you’ve got some similarities between this group and that group, but there’s a lot of differences between these two groups. So if you’re going to think about marketing messages, or placement of stores, or a redesign of your packaging, you’re going to have to think of this as two audiences because you’ve got a big divide here — or guess what, you lucked out. They’re all exactly the same on the inside. Their values are identical so you can just go forward with one approach. Shaw: Looking at those 56 value clusters, it seems to me there are more things that should bring us together than drive us apart — you refer to them as “togetherness values”, there’s five of them. They explain the human species, to a large extent. Allison: We did a study of people who watch Fox versus people who watch CNN. I thought it would be a more interesting way to see what’s going on than just political ideology. I did it because I thought I’d be a bit of a shit disturber and that I’d get banjo-picking hillbillies versus elite academics locked in an ivory tower. And I thought, “This would be great press.” All I wanted out of life was Anderson Cooper to say, “According to a Valuegraphics study,” just once during the evening news. And so I was hoping for some big divide, and actually what I found out is they’re very similar. On the inside, Americans on either side of this giant divide have so many more things in common with each other than they do that are different, and so many things more in common with each other than I think they want to admit. It gives me hope that at some point in the future they’re going to find their way home. Shaw: It is about finding common ground, for sure, which brings me to a question. Every company has its values, whether they live up to them or not. How important is it that those values align with customer values? How important is it for them to be in sync? Allison: I love this question. Thank you so much for asking it. I have a really hard time with most organizations and the methodologies they use to determine their company values because I believe that no matter how well intentioned they are, it ends up being an exercise in what I call business poetry, choosing some words that everybody loves and putting them up on a wall. And they’re chosen, again, with good intentions, but I’d say that any company who can show me that anyone would notice if their values were swapped out for their competitors’ is very rare. They all say things like “cooperation, and diversity, and excellence” — that’s a favorite one, excellence. Except it’s not a value! Think of it as a Venn diagram. Where the circles overlap you’ll find a set of two or DECEMBER 2023
three values that work for everyone, all the stakeholders. Those are your company values. Whether you like them or not, those are truly the place where the C suite should start having conversations about, “What do we stand for?” Shaw: What if customers are spread fairly evenly across different groups? What’s your default segmentation at that point? Allison: So that determination is, I think, best left to individual organizations to decide. Back to real estate, and this applies across the board: Let’s say one segment in your profile is family oriented; the other segments are hardworking, workaholic kind of folks who are all about ambition, and social status, and trying to get ahead in life. You can’t build a building that’s going to make both groups happy so you’ve got to pick one and say, “We’re going to lean in favor of this one versus that one”. So the more narrow you go, the more specific you can build something, the faster the uptake, the more loyal the people will be. They’ll feel like you made this just for them, and that’s the goal. Shaw: Where I think it can really pay off — put aside the targeting question for a second — is influencing the values and beliefs that a company stands for and where they should invest back into the community. Allison: Absolutely. Look at Bud Light. They decided, with all good intentions, to try and support the trans community, did a very small thing to help Dylan Mulvaney and give her a bit of money and one can of beer with an image on it. That was the extent of it, and that was someone sitting in a boardroom going, “You know, it’s Gay Pride Month and the trans community is something that a lot of people are paying attention to, so let’s reach out and let’s do this thing.” And we all know what happened. Their stock price halved and the blowback was insane. The fact is, not every company should support all things. Bud Light maybe shouldn’t be supporting the LGBTQ-plus community. Maybe they should be supporting childhood poverty, adult literacy, or cancer research. There’s a bazillion things they could be doing to be good corporate citizens. And instead of a random decision made through a few discussions internally, if you know what people care about deep inside their hearts and you set your strategy for your ESG work accordingly, you’re going to resonate. So it’s a way to de-risk those decisions. Shaw: Is the way to go here to find common ground — the causes that line up with the values of the majority of customers? Allison: I don’t think that a Valuegraphic profile for an organization should be the way that you decide on a specific issue. You still need those conversations with your stakeholder groups. But it can point you in the right direction. There’s a term in the research world called “the last mile”: when you are about to make a decision, you pile
up all the stats and data you possibly can, all the data, put it all on the table, and then someone’s still got to say, “Okay, based on all that, I think we’re gonna do this.” The distance between the research and that decision is referred to as “the last mile”. But if you know the values of the people you’re trying to impact, that last mile becomes the last hundred yards. You still need to make a guess. It’s not going to tell you what to do, but it’s going to tell you what direction to go. Shaw: The other opportunity for companies is to create social movements. In the book you give the example of North Face versus Patagonia. Allison: Everybody knows what Patagonia is all about. It’s about the environment and about sustainability, and when we profile Patagonia shoppers, we see, for example, the value of personal responsibility is incredibly high. So Patagonia’s positioning is, you as a customer of ours are going to help the environment. Even their community giving program offers microgrants to small organizations to do something good in the community. Instead of them making a big, splashy donation, they’re letting you do it — personal responsibility. They got to a place where they understand who’s buying their stuff, and what their values are. Even the founder said, “I’ve got enough money. I’m ready to retire. All the profit from this point forward goes to saving the planet.” It’s the biggest values-driven mic drop in history. I can imagine the Vice President of Marketing for North Face going, “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”. And if you look back in the timeline, suddenly there’s all these big environmental donations from North Face, and Arc’teryx, and everybody else who plays in that space saying, “Hey, we’re doing a good thing over here, too.” With North Face, one of the values that really ranks high for their consumers is creativity. These people see themselves as creative, and they gravitate towards anything that will give them the chance to be more creative. So if I was North Face, what I would be doing is finding out every way I could double down on owning creativity, and letting Patagonia have environmentalism. Anecdotally, here in Vancouver where I live, there’s lots of film crews out on the streets all the time shooting movies. You walk by and look at these crowds of people who are working behind the camera, and 75 percent to 80 percent of them are wearing North Face. So it’s been adopted by the film industry as the brand of choice. Shaw: Which values do you personally cherish? Allison: I want to see if we can’t get people to stop using demographics as a way to understand other people. Because if we just change that, if we don’t do anything else, if we just change the way we look at people — not as black or female or old or gay, but as people — we can make the world a better place. That sounds like a cliche, but it’s true DMN.CA ❰
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MANAGEMENT
Resisting a Rest: How Urgency Culture Polices Our Work BY LYDIA PHILLIP
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ull disclosure: this article was completed a week late. The stress had been building from the pressure I was putting on myself to complete my draft while also being on the road facilitating our storytelling workshops across the province. It was 9pm and I was tucked into a booth at a café in Antigonish staring at my computer screen, willing sentences to leap out of the messy ideas and bullet points. I had just driven two and a half hours. The session wasn’t until the next morning, but I needed to get work done. Finally, I took a pause. I realized I’m writing a piece on ‘Urgency Culture’ while the self-imposed urgency was creating a mountain of overwhelm (and, yes, I can laugh at the irony). This is just one example, but why does this keep showing up in our work even when we’re conscious of it? Urgency culture serves, protects Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy are all interconnected and our relationship with work is a product of oppression. Capitalism is rooted in dehumanizing and exploiting people for profit. We’ve been taught that we need to justify our existence with output, that we’re only valued if we’re producing — leading to urgency and grind culture, the mentality that we must always be filling our space with work to achieve capitalist accolades. I think of urgency culture as the “less conscious hustle culture” — a state of urgency applied to our day-to-day. But the result is nearly identical — we’re constantly in motion, always feeling behind, and in a state of overwhelm. Transformational work takes time and energy. How do you challenge the status quo when you’re just trying to keep your head above water? Urgency ❱ DMN.CA
culture is sinister in the way that it wreaks havoc on rest and keeps us in the overwhelm, allowing the status quo (white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism) to thrive. These systems are dependent on the belief that we are our labour — that our work defines us. Maintaining the unsustainable pace of capitalism is intended to distract us from the urgent decolonizing and liberating work.
time for relational work and needs assessments and instead jumping on activities that provide measurable results but may not be in the best interest of those being served. In a sector where there’s more equity-deserving people on the front lines versus in management positions, we need to ask who is setting the priorities and how is applying urgency to funder relationships affecting
Urgency culture often shows up in the impact space, and is just one symptom of capitalism and white supremacy culture, Below are some of the ways that urgency can show up in our work and how we can combat it.
community health and what work is supported?
Urgency and paternalism In the Community Impact Sector, there’s often an urgency to provide proof of production — which perpetuates the power dynamic between funders and the sector as well as within organizations. Funders who have economic power may have vastly different lived experiences and priorities than the communities they intend to serve. Urgency culture favours funder priorities, removing the
The promise of next time Relational work and collaboration take time, and urgency culture is the antithesis of inclusion. It’s often the justification for efficiency, falling back to hierarchical decision-making without ethical consultation of those affected. It provides control and reinforces traditional management models with the top-down dictation of work. When urgency is applied, the result often is decisions being made unilaterally at the top without the consent, advice, and buy-in of the community and team on the ground. And it’s an excuse
that we’re used to accepting. We speak the language of urgency. We accept production, quantity over quality, for the promised next time. Next time we’ll invite those communities. Next time we’ll include you in the conversation about your work. Next time we’ll consider accessibility needs. Burnout accelerator: If everything is on fire, nothing is on fire If no one has told you this yet, allow me: You’re not bad at prioritizing — you’re burnt out. We’re shapeshifters, pulled in many directions. We’re in a constant state of overlapping tasks and competing priorities as we push one thing out the door to immediately leap into the next. When do we stop to take a breath? This constant reactive state is overwhelming, leading to mental exhaustion and decision-fatigue. Remember the Pixar movie “The Incredibles” (2004)? In one scene, the villain says, “When everyone is super, no one will be” — okay, he was gearing up for a big evil scheme, but my point here is that if we make everything super (urgent), then nothing is. Urgency soon loses its significance if we learn to live with the constant state of fire. A lot of the work we do in the Community Impact Sector, especially the work on the ground, is urgent — but how do we separate the urgent from the artificial so we can better take care of ourselves and others? Reinforces ableism “Multi-tasker. Works well under pressure. Thrives in a fast–paced environment.” Urgency culture greatly privileges able-bodied, neurotypical, people who fit in or can more readily assimilate to colonial ways of working. By design, capitalism is an ableist, DECEMBER 2023
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MANAGEMENT individualistic and hierarchical system that bases success on ability. Whether we are labelled “unproductive” or not is due to the perceived value of our labour. But with unrealistic expectations of production, capitalism is made unnecessarily difficult for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodiverse people. And with fast decisionmaking, quick turnarounds, and the stamina to continuously work attributed to good leaders — those forced to navigate (or barred entry from) inaccessible workplaces and those who process the world differently are disproportionately penalized. Privileges of white-led organizations In the same vein of quick turnarounds and ability to produce, urgency culture within the sector privileges organizations with greater resources and capacity to act. We know that Black and Indigenous-led and serving organizations are underfunded, stretched thin, and lacking the resources that white-led organizations are given. Thinking about the traditional funding system: tight deadlines, strenuous applications, stringent reporting – the organizations that are greater resourced have an advantage in securing funding and additional opportunities. This can often lead to white saviorism in the sector: organizations creating solutions for communities where they don’t have the lived experiences, knowhow, or trusted relationships. Challenging the status quo So where does urgency culture come from and who does it benefit? We’re told that we can win the game if we just work harder, put in more time, and strive for more. But what if we just… don’t? What if we consciously choose ourselves and our community. What if, despite what colonialism has deeply engrained in us, we choose our humanity. Resisting urgency culture Combating urgency culture is both an individual and collective practice. I am incredibly fortunate to be part of an organization that is committed to finding new ways of working. IONS is by no means an expert (in fact in September’s blog, DECEMBER 2023
Annika Voltan writes about how external pressures and colonial ways of working forced us to stop and slow down) but we are willing to try. This isn’t small work. It takes time, energy, and each other. I can write a whole piece about it, but I’m still unlearning and practicing, but I’ve pulled together some considerations for resisting urgency culture.
aren’t “hustling” aren’t being productive. Not holding space for and encouraging conversations about the busyness has created a noticeable, healthy shift in our team culture. Collective Practice. It takes a village. What is the organizational definition of urgency and what requires an urgent response? This is developed together with input
Inclusive decision-making. Exclusionary and rushed decisions can actually take more time in the long run as unseen issues or intrapersonal challenges may arise. At IONS, we’ve been restructuring how we work together toward peer support and accountability over hierarchy. We’ve been exploring practices like consent-based decision-making, the advising
Self-leadership. Take a pause when you start to feel the pressure of the day-to-day. Some cues are: “I have so much I need to get done”, “I don’t have time for that,” or “How do I do it all?” Reflect on where the pressure is coming from. How are you contributing to urgency culture in yourself and others? If something is a priority for you, is it for everyone else? Who is this going to affect if you don’t get it done? Challenge your own deadlines and expectations. Perhaps recalibrate and adjust your plan. Be gentle with yourself and your team. Support from leaders. This mindset needs to be shared by leadership. This means that leaders are willing to slow down; they see boundary setting as healthy. They understand that things often take longer than anticipated, that everyone works at different paces, and they’re willing to collaborate to create accommodating work plans that are based on lived experiences and accessibility needs. Stop glorifying busyness. This reinforces urgency culture, unhealthy work-life balance, and implies that those who
at all levels and experiences and then practiced. Practice calling out urgency creep and pausing to determine the options and whether it requires escalation. Rest Intentionally. How are we redefining productivity to include spaciousness, rest and reflection? How do we go slow to just go slow? Rest is revolutionary, and one of the most powerful explanations I have heard came from the podcast “No More Grind: How to Finally Rest” featuring Tricia Hershey of the Nap Ministry. Some ways that IONS is intentionally prioritizing rest is with the 4-day Work Week and self-reflective, journalling days throughout the year. Purposeful Work. Take the time to revisit organizational and personal values. What are you committed to? How is work selected and implemented — is it with a JEDDI (justice, equity, decolonization, diversity, inclusion) lens? Is the work driven by purpose, or is it funder-driven? This could mean developing collaborative proposals, pushing back on the “quantity over quality” activities, or even saying no to some funding.
process, and Brave New Work. Our work is important — our livelihoods are important, but when you feel urgency in your day-to-day, show yourself grace, take a breath and ask yourself: Is this The Work? Housing people is urgent. Bodily autonomy is urgent. Climate action is urgent. Decolonization, Black liberation, racial justice, and disability justice are urgent. Taking care of each other and our planet is urgent. Dismantling oppressive systems is urgent. When we are exhausted and burnt out, we lack our gift to imagine, ideate, and create. It’s harder to reimagine new ways of working and being together. The constant state of busyness keeps us from dreaming and dismantling. Rest is resistance and slowing down is truly a radical, anticapitalist practice. LYDIA PHILLIP is the Communications Manager at Impact Organizations of Nova Scotia. Lydia oversees IONS’ external communications, branding, social media, and website development. She creates content and contributes to IONS’ work through championing the sector through her power in writing and storytelling. DMN.CA ❰
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TECHNOLOGY
The End of Dashboards BY CATHRIN SCHNEIDER
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elf-serve business intelligence and analytics solutions are supposed to be designed for people like me. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at Klipfolio, and oversee the marketing and customer success teams that make data-driven decisions every day. Despite being part of an analytics company and fairly data-literate, I’m not a technical data specialist. My decision making, therefore, relies on clean, trusted data presented in a format my teams and I can understand and use. ❱ DMN.CA
Unfortunately, the needs of end users are often an afterthought when discussing the challenges of modern business intelligence software. This needs to change. I firmly believe that keeping the end user in mind is key to developing a superior product. And, that includes self-serve analytics solutions. Based on my personal experience and interactions with our customers (team members from marketing, sales, or customer service) I’ve learned there’s one thing most of them want — dashboards. Sorry, data team! Please try to hold back your yawns.
Why dashboards? Because their needs are not being met by their current analytics solution. They keep coming back to the familiarity of dashboards as they try to accomplish these three things: 1. Understand and communicate their data’s story 2. Trust their data as a single source of truth 3. Have access to a truly selfserve analytics tool that’s straightforward to use I’m convinced there’s a way to navigate the data “wild west” that’s plaguing many organizations
today. Let’s fix analytics together! I promise your data team will never have to build another report or dashboard, your business teams will be able to confidently make independent, data-driven decisions, and your organization will finally be able to leverage the power of data. The state of self-serve analytics Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) concepts propel business decisions based on data from customers, external resources, and the software used by various teams. Smaller organizations sometimes DECEMBER 2023
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ISTOCK/KHANCHIT KHIRISUTCHALUAL
TECHNOLOGY
have “someone technical” on the team who can provide others with the data they need. However, this solution doesn’t scale well in growing companies with their ever-increasing requests for data. Integrating a self-serve analytics solution into the company’s data stack not only decreases the number of ad hoc requests to the data team, it enables business teams to make faster, data-driven decisions. But, according to these studies, BI tools have an alarmingly low adoption rate of 26 percent on average across all organizations (Wiisdom), with 74 percent of employees feeling overwhelmed or dissatisfied when handling data (Accenture). Based on customer conversations and my experience working in mid-sized companies, I’ve learned which end users’ needs aren’t being met by DECEMBER 2023
most self-serve analytics tools – and I’m ready to share. Not just a “wish”, a “need” Data team members may groan when asked for yet another dashboard. Though dashboards aren’t exactly cutting edge these days, they’re frequently requested by end users because they represent data using a familiar format. The same applies to requests for “a slightly different version of that report”. As effective leaders, we understand that there’s a need behind every expressed wish. In the case of dashboards, there are several (non-trivial) needs worth considering. When your marketing leader asks for a marketing campaign dashboard, they’re expressing the need for the following requirements.
What business teams need Guidance & definitions. Business users need guidance on what to measure. For example, which metrics should a marketing leader be using? You may assume this is something they should already know but that’s often not the case. Figuring out the right metrics for the task usually requires iteration and a crossfunctional effort. Consider this example: Your marketing team uses Google Ads as one of their marketing channels. They need to know how much they can spend per conversion or sale to maintain profitability. They also require a set of visualizations so they can easily access useful data each time they review the performance of their campaigns. In this scenario, the finance department needs to provide insight into the maximum customer acquisition costs. The marketing team needs to share how they structure and steer their campaigns and what other metrics they use (for example, CTR). Obviously, also the data team, that accesses, cleans, transforms, and visualizes the raw data, plays a critical role. All three departments must collaborate closely to agree on the definition and calculation of metrics such as “cost per lead” or “customer acquisition cost”. Identifying and defining the essential metrics for the entire business is a cross-functional effort. As a crucial part of datadriven decisions, this process must be carefully considered and shouldn’t be rushed. Metric libraries like MetricHQ can help with definition and calculation, but each organization ultimately needs to determine which metrics are most relevant to them. To understand more about the value of metrics for decision-making, check out this article. Insights. To gain insights from your data, you need to view the same metric from various perspectives, a task well-designed dashboards should accomplish. However, this requirement may be challenging for non-technical users to describe. This might be why your business colleagues repeatedly make ad hoc requests for visualization adjustments. A welldefined metric should be broken down into segments that reflect the marketing or organizational
strategy. Verticals and geographies can represent significant segments, aiding the marketing team in gaining deeper insights into their campaign performance. An easy, non-technical method of filtering and segmenting data can address a significant number of ad hoc requests. However, a carefully curated dashboard is still necessary to see the whole picture without the bias that comes from focusing on limited perspectives. Trustworthy data. When analyzing data, nothing’s more frustrating than discovering conflicting values in your reports. The inability to rely on a selfserve analytics solution can be as exasperating for business end users as it is for the data team to reconcile misaligned KPIs. Most business teams don’t have the technical expertise to sift through all the tables to extract the data they need. Data duplication and misaligned definitions and calculations are generally far removed from the day-to-day tasks of most end users. This makes it difficult for them to fully grasp the challenges faced by their data team. Relying on misleading data not only results in poor business decisions, it also undermines trust in their self-serve analytics solution. In most cases, rather than run the risk of ending up with incorrect data, business users choose not to try to do it themselves and, instead, open another ad hoc request with the data team. What business users want (and need) are curated metrics that include reliable, consistent data. An intuitive BI solution. Let’s be honest. Most people in marketing, sales, and customer success, and even many business leaders, struggle to use BI solutions, even those that claim to be self-serve. Tools like Tableau and PowerBI, while powerful and loved by many analysts, can be challenging for the majority of business teams because of their technical complexity. Despite companies investing time and money in training, most users never become proficient at using these tools. As a result, user confidence is low which leads to poor adoption rates. The consistency and familiarity of a dashboard, in contrast, is easy to use and doesn’t require users to dig DMN.CA ❰
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TECHNOLOGY into a solution with which they’re uncomfortable. Independent decision making. While I can’t speak for everyone, my experience suggests that many business users would love to find the answers to their data questions themselves. They just need the right tools and metrics. I don’t think anyone enjoys lining up their ad hoc requests and having their projects delayed while they wait for data. As an aside, most people would agree that data specialists should focus on the true data challenges, such as improving the data infrastructure, solving complex or new analytical challenges, and learning how AI could propel their decision making. The desire for independence and easy access to data makes dashboards especially appealing to business users. A dashboard isn’t only accessible and trustworthy. It’s also a personal space where business users can make decisions without depending on (or waiting for) contributions from the data team. The role of dashboards Requests for dashboards aren’t likely to diminish anytime soon, especially in smaller, less datamature organizations. That’s because the concept of a curated, continually-updated dashboard — acting as an authoritative single source of truth for decision making — is not only valid, it’s precisely what’s required to make data-driven decisions. Dashboards go a long way toward satisfying the need for guidance, insight, and trustworthy data. They’re the basis for independent decision making but can only truly shine when they’re powered by the right analytics solution. So far we’ve talked about the need for reliable dashboards. Now, let’s look at how the right BI solution can provide the missing pieces of the dashboard puzzle. Quality metrics for quality decisions We don’t need more data, we need better data. In this era of information, we’re overwhelmed by an excess of data, much of which lacks meaning and structure. Jordan Tigani, the founding engineer of BigQuery, believes that much of the data that’s stored goes unprocessed, particularly as ❱ DMN.CA
it ages. He’s publicly discussed the challenges of big data, labeling it a “liability”. I think we all agree that data has no value without meaning. This is the main reason why an increasing number of data engineers and analysts are implementing a metrics framework within their organization so they can structure their data and infuse it with business relevance. A metric simultaneously describes a data structure and a business concept. This helps companies determine which data is genuinely necessary for decision making. By identifying the (leading) indicators of success and allocating the resources needed to define and calculate high-quality metrics, businesses can decide which data to focus on and maintain. Metrics will vary from business model to business model, industry to industry, and department to department, but there are many defined “best practice” metrics that are applicable to most companies. MetricHQ, the first communitydriven dictionary for metrics and KPIs, is a widely-used resource for researching metrics, looking up definitions and calculations, and even contributing your own metrics. Identifying the essential metrics for your business is a crucial first step, as it informs teams on what they should measure and ensures everyone uses the same definitions. A semantic layer as a single source of truth For a BI tool to be effective (and well-adopted), end users need to be 100 percent confident in the data. Business users may not have the technical expertise (or the time) to understand the complexities of the data’s structure. They just need to know that it’s reliable and consistent. Their data has to reflect the same values for the same metric company wide. This leads us to a crucial point – everyone must operate based on the same metric, thus a metric should be unique. This is where the semantic layer (at Klipfolio we often refer to it as a metrics layer) comes into play. As an integral part of the modern data stack, the semantic layer approach has gained popularity in recent years, and for good reasons. The semantic layer abstracts the business logic from raw data and sits between data
sources and the visualization layer. It becomes the metric’s single source of truth and comprises the metric name, the definition, the formula and aggregation method, and the instructions on where to query the data. Metrics layer as part of the modern data stack PowerMetrics was the first analytics product built around a metrics layer, though other players are starting to adopt this approach. The benefits of this layer are significant for both business and data teams. The data team maintains a central repository of metrics, ensuring the data is accurate, complete, and unique. Metrics can be shared with individuals or teams for selfserve analysis and dashboards. Regardless of who uses the metric, it consistently reflects the same values. Analytics designed for business teams and decision makers Many of our customers tell us that while their analysts are adept at using complex but powerful business intelligence solutions, such as Tableau and PowerBI, their business teams — like marketing, sales, and customer success — find them too challenging. Despite claims of self-service capabilities, these tools aren’t accessible to everyone. In most companies, business team members significantly outnumber the analysts. Consequently, the majority of people who should be making data-driven decisions either lack access to trusted data or rely on data teams to present the data to them, causing bottlenecks. Or worse, they stick with Excel. Wouldn’t it make sense to complement the analytics stack with a solution designed specifically for use by business teams? With all metrics centrally stored in the semantic layer (aka the metrics layer), there would be no issues with data duplication, even if an organization decided to implement multiple analytics solutions. In fact, this would allow every team to select their preferred tool, while working from the same underlying metrics. PowerMetrics is close to the solution. It’s an analytics tool designed for non-technical decision makers and business teams, backed by a strong data-
team feature set. Offering a broad range of powerful analytics features, it still feels lightweight and is not overwhelming to use. Our customers appreciate using PowerMetrics in parallel with other applications, and we’re working on making this system more open to integration with more analytics solutions. While building dashboards may not seem like a glamorous task for a data team, it’s critical for business teams. Dashboards are incredibly useful for telling a data story and sharing that story with others. That’s why dashboards should be built by the business teams who craft the story, not by the data teams who provide the metrics. With the better solutions, once validated metrics are provided, business users are able to independently create meaningful dashboards and share them with their colleagues. Data by the data team. Business by the business team. The needs of business end users — more guidance on what to measure, help in defining metrics, access to trustworthy data, and an analytics solution that’s designed for their requirements (including the ability to create and share dashboards) — are perfectly aligned with the needs of most data teams. After creating metrics, many data engineers prefer a “hands-off” approach when it comes to visualization, analytics, and dashboard creation. This is what makes working with PowerMetrics, a metric-centric analytics product, so exhilarating. It allows the data team to own the metrics and keep them clean and accurate. At the same time, it enables the data-literate, but non-technical, business teams to be completely independent with access to a truly self-serve BI tool. No more bottlenecks and ad hoc dashboard requests. Let’s work toward an analytics future where every team can focus and excel at what they do best. If we can do that, my promise to data teams will be fulfilled — you’ll never have to build another dashboard! CATHRIN SCHNEIDER is the Chief Operating Officer of Klipfolio and oversees the marketing and customer success divisions and is passionate about shaping the company’s business strategy.
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TECHNOLOGY
I
n the ever-evolving realm of digital marketing, Canada stands at the forefront, embracing innovative strategies and technologies to drive businesses forward. As we navigate through 2023, it’s crucial to examine the prevailing trends shaping the digital marketing landscape in the Great White North. Enhanced Personalization Personalization continues to be a focal point in digital marketing strategies. Canadian businesses are leveraging data analytics and AI-driven tools to deliver hyperpersonalized content and experiences to their target audiences. Tailoring marketing efforts based on consumer behaviors and preferences remains a powerful method to engage and retain customers. Video Marketing Dominance Video content reigns supreme in Canada’s digital marketing scene. From captivating YouTube campaigns to engaging social media stories, businesses are leveraging the power of video to convey their messages effectively. With the surge in video consumption, marketers are investing more in interactive and visually appealing content to attract and retain consumer attention. DECEMBER 2023
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Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends for 2024 Responsibility In line with global trends, Canadians are placing greater emphasis on sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Brands integrating eco-friendly practices and supporting social causes are resonating strongly with the Canadian audience. Marketers are highlighting these initiatives in their campaigns, aligning with the values of socially conscious consumers.
Voice Search Optimization Voice search technology is gaining traction in Canada. With the increasing usage of smart devices and virtual assistants, marketers are optimizing content for voicebased queries. Tailoring SEO strategies to accommodate conversational language and long-tail keywords is becoming essential for businesses to maintain visibility in voice search results.
Influencer Partnerships Influencer marketing continues to thrive in Canada. Collaborating with influencers who align with a brand’s values and target demographics has proven to be an effective way to reach and engage audiences. Canadian businesses are increasingly partnering with influencers to authentically promote their products and services.
Augmented Reality (AR) Experiences The integration of augmented reality into marketing strategies is gaining momentum in Canada. Brands are utilizing AR to offer immersive and interactive experiences to consumers, allowing them to engage with products before making a purchase. This technology is reshaping the way businesses connect with their audience, especially in the retail and e-commerce sectors. Data Privacy and Compliance With the implementation of updated data protection laws, such as Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), ensuring data privacy and compliance has become a top priority for digital marketers. Businesses are adopting stringent measures to protect consumer data and comply with evolving regulations. The landscape of digital marketing in Canada is vibrant and diverse, characterized by a blend of technological innovation, consumer-centric strategies, and a growing emphasis on ethical business practices. Staying abreast of these trends is essential for businesses aiming to make a meaningful impact in the Canadian market. Courtesy of Digital Technology On Demand (Toronto) DMN.CA ❰
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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Key Principles for Creating Meaningful Customer Experiences Based on Data
BY KAREN NAVES
C
ustomer experience is the new battleground and marketing is on the frontlines. With more choices than ever, customers are demanding more out of the buying experience, regardless of whether it is B2B or a consumer purchase. Customer loyalty is something that is earned not an automatic given. No industry is exempt. From financial services to retail and healthcare to travel, buyers are demanding easier, better, more personalized experiences. The bottom line: if you deliver an unpleasant experience, customers can easily pick up and go somewhere else. That is why companies need to take control of the customer experience. Fully 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay for a great customer experience, according to PWC. But many marketers are losing control of those experiences as buyers increasingly direct their own journey. Whether it is looking for reviews and recommendations, doing research through search engines, comparison shopping, or even providing input to a call centre, customer experiences are ❱ DMN.CA
increasingly dynamic and across multiple channels. The pandemic-driven lockdowns put digital transformation into overdrive and proved to organizations that a sound digital strategy is not optional anymore. More people are working from home and more events are virtual than ever; the odds that this becomes the norm, rather than the exception, is high. So, the timeline for transformation compresses from years to months. But even at a time when digital is the only option, companies need to still be thinking about the blending of the digital and physical experiences. Data is the foundation for these experiences, and the key to crafting more relevant brand engagements. The shift to digital is putting pressure on companies to gain more insights and improve efficiencies through their data. Through data, companies can optimize their marketing spend more quickly and predict opportunities with their customers. Working to overcome long-running marketing hurdles like developing a single view of the customer is being further complicated by the increased global data privacy standards and
consumer preferences for brands they can trust. Companies that have invested in their digital transformation to enable personalized, real-time customer experiences while maintaining customer’s trust are winning the battle today and are prepared for tomorrow’s. How do organizations walk the line between agility and stability, between being data-driven and being driven mad by how much data there is? That is why we are introducing the strategy known as Dynamic Marketing. Dynamic marketing is a way to move from the blunt instruments of mass digital or disconnected, channel-based experiences to relevant and realtime experiences based on unified data. Dynamic marketing is the belief that to innovate, you need to understand your customers through data, and you need to tune into their needs right now. For your customers, their experiences happen in multiple channels in real time. Website visits and phone calls and app usage happen simultaneously and dynamically; without a real-time, data-driven strategy,
your customer’s experience will be disjointed. To achieve this, companies need the purpose-built customer data foundation that unifies the tech stack and orchestrates the customer experience from a single source of truth throughout the entire customer journey. Stick around and learn more about the five key principles to transform your marketing organizations into a customer experience powerhouse. Dynamic Marketing is not a magic bullet, instead, it’s a reflection of the way your buyers already engage with your brand. According to Gartner, processing a single data subject request (to comply with CCPA or GDPR) costs (on average) $1,406 per request, ultimately costing an average of $140k-$275k for every million consumer records on hand. Dynamic Marketing Principle #1: TRUST Buyers expect a trusted experience and their preferences to be upheld. Ninety-seven percent of consumers are somewhat or very concerned about protecting their data, according to our 2019 DECEMBER 2023
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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Consumer Data Privacy Report. Look at industry leaders like Apple and Google: they repositioned themselves as trustworthy by highlighting the ways their products and services help consumers take control of their data privacy without sacrificing great user experiences. Consumers are already more than willing to tell us marketers how they want us to communicate with them, if marketers know how to listen. Thanks to data privacy regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act and a rash of high-profile data breaches, consumers are taking control of the data they hand over to companies. Privacy and contact preferences are what’s known as zero-party data — the data that customers intentionally and proactively share with you to define their own experience with your brand. This is some of the most valuable data because it will help you make intelligent, data-driven choices about your customer experience. Building trust requires you to have total control over customer data. To do that, privacy needs to be a priority from the top down and across all teams that handle customer data. Legal, marketing, sales, IT, and analytics teams will each play a role in ensuring customer data is cared for. Culture is one aspect of the equation. Technology will play an important role as well as marketers learn to listen to consumers’ privacy concerns. To unlock the power of all your customer data in real time, your consent data needs to be automated and unified with that data at the same time. One way to achieve this technologically is by combining a Consent Management Platform with a Customer Data Platform so you can collect consent preferences in the moment in one channel, correlate it to that customer’s profile, and distribute the consent preferences across your other tools and Channels. According to the BRP Consumer Study, 87 percent of buyers are interested in a personalized and consistent experience across all channels. Companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5 percent yearDECEMBER 2023
over-year increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4 percent for weak omnichannel companies, according to Aberdeen Group. Dynamic Marketing Principle #2: UNIFIED Buyers require a relevant experience, which depends on unified customer data. When you have unified customer data, the customer experiences your brand as a cohesive group. When data isn’t unified, it becomes painfully obvious. Whether it’s ads promoting goods the customer already purchased or emails being sent after customers opted out of that communication method, customers know when your teams aren’t working in concert because it leads to bad customer experiences. Unified customer data is not just a matter of technology. Data unity starts with alignment at the executive level. As the CMO, you’re responsible for the customer experience, but so much of what makes up the customer experience takes place outside of your control. That’s why you need to be on the same page with the other teams that are shaping the rest of the customer journey, like your sales and customer support teams. Unifying the teams, technologies, and processes responsible for your customer’s data does more than support great customer experiences. Achieving customer data unity makes building trust with your customers simpler because there is no data silo left uncovered. Unified data requires good governance, which in turn fuels your ability to provide customers with the level of data privacy they expect. To achieve a unified data approach and fuel the best customer experience, you need a holistic view of customer data. We refer to this as a customer data supply chain: the collection of tools and strategies that handle customer data standardization and collection, vendor integration and optimization, omnichannel profile enrichment, campaign action triggers, and data management for business intelligence teams. When you know you collect, standardize, enrich, activate, and govern all of your customer data, you’re naturally going to end up delivering more relevant customer experiences.
Putting Dynamic Marketing into Play: 6 Data Management Practices Every CMO Should Empower.
As a CMO, you’ll need to empower your teams to be data-driven creators. There are six fundamental practices that you as a marketing organization need to strive towards mastering. COLLECT. Your team needs to be able to collect all of the data behind the customer experience. This includes your client-side collection (through Tag Management Systems) and server-side collection (APIs); sources can include your website, instore point-ofsale systems, Customer Record Management systems, call centre, in-store, mobile and app data. These data points will help you create a comprehensive single view of the customer and will fuel all of your customer-centric marketing initiatives. STANDARDIZE AND GOVERN. No matter how much data you collect if it isn’t governed it isn’t usable. In fact, you won’t need all of the data you collect, but knowing what data you need and when will make you a more agile organization. That’s why every company needs to have its own business rules to uniformly define the disparate data sources. Many tech vendors provide their own ways to standardize data, but relying on third-party data definitions means your company has less control over your customer data. TRANSFORM AND ENRICH. A single piece of data on its own does not provide a complete picture of the customer; in the transform and enrich stage all of the data you’ve collected is brought together and aligned with a technology that can create individual customer profiles, like a Customer Data Platform. This single source of truth for the customer’s experience with your brand is what sets the stage for creating the moments that matter to them. INTEGRATE. Marketers have a lot of tools to use to craft the customer experience — from Email Service Providers to Facebook. To get the most out of your customer data insights, you need to be able to integrate them with your customer experience tools from a single source of truth. The more you integrate your martech stack, the better your customer data feedback loop will be as you constantly enrich the customer profile with more data and insights. ACTIVATE. Activating data in real-time, in the right channel, with the right message takes a solid data foundation to make it happen. Delivering an omnichannel approach from a single source of truth — like a Customer Data Platform — makes it easier for your different marketing teams to work from the same playbook. It creates consistency and efficiencies, saving your teams time and money. PREDICT. By layering predictive insights with machine learning capabilities into your customer data foundation, you’re enabling the rest of the tech stack with a single source of intelligence. With predictive models driving your customer experiences, you’ll be able to be more strategic about the experiences you create for customers. You’ll deliver experiences that are more likely to matter to them — and that’s a win for everyone. DMN.CA ❰
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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Dynamic Marketing Principle #3: NOW Real-time capabilities may just seem nice-to-have, but they can mean the difference between life and death. When Covid-19 started to spread, companies had to react on the fly to make changes for the safety of their customers. For one travel company, this meant their marketing team, without IT help, was able to create and engage audiences of travelers headed to COVID-19 hot spots in under one day. Executing an original campaign with accuracy on the fly required having a real-time data foundation in place long before. Buyers expect experiences to be in the moment and accurate; you need real-time data collection and delivery. Trust and unity are a great foundation for marketing excellence; what starts to set industry leaders apart is their ability to provide experiences in real time. For your customers, the ability to work in real time conveys the next level of sophistication and care for the customer experience. It’s why Amazon kept pushing beyond 2-day shipping to same day shipping and then 2-hour shipping. Real-time CX delights customers who have been trained to expect instant gratification; from bingewatching entire seasons to instant pots, now is king. Real-time customer experiences require the entire data process — from collection, standardization, enrichment, transformation, and activation — to happen in milliseconds. Waiting around for weeks, hours or even minutes puts you at a competitive disadvantage. And the biggest competitor you face is yourself when you drop the ball at the moment of engagement. As more of our lives move to digital experiences, your brand risks becoming less sticky. Customers will move on to the next option — unless you can adjust in the moment. There’s a measure of freedom you’ll have as a marketer if your customer engagement is dictated by the needs of the customer, not by the time limitations of your data processing. Even if your current ideal engagement window for abandoned cart campaigns is ❱ DMN.CA
two hours, maybe in the future a five-minute delay leads to higher conversions. Building a real-time data foundation now means you can futureproof your strategies and be more agile without overhauling your data strategy first. Moving to a real-time marketing approach will mean relying on automation to deliver at speed and scale. Today, there are real-time Customer Data Platforms that can do this work for you. Prioritizing a real-time CDP as part of your marketing tech stack is a power move for the rest of your tech stack investment. With real-time customer insights sent out from the CDP to the rest of your customer experience touchpoints, each one of those tools gets a boost. Your real-time and automated data foundation gives your marketing team the flexibility to execute and iterate on the fly. Dynamic Marketing Principle #4: EVERYWHERE Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91 percent greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t, according to a survey conducted by Aspect Software. Buyers require a relevant and consistent experience across channels. According to Marketing Week, customers today use an average of six different touchpoints to interact with brands. Whether or not you have an omni-channel approach to marketing and CX, your customers are engaging like you do because the options are there. You need to be able to execute consistent experiences and messaging across them all. Being everywhere is a fine balance to strike, though: following consumers across social media and in their inbox can come across as creepy. That’s why you need to build trust with your customers that you’re using their data towards ends that benefit them. And then you need a unified and real-time data foundation to put that messaging to work where it matters for your individual customers. That’s why personalization should include more than just tailored content; being everywhere means using discretion to deliver the right message at the right time in the right channel to the right person. That’s a lot to get right;
to do so, you need your valuable customer data insights connected to all of your channels. What does this look like in practice? By bringing together offline and online data together in a Customer Data Platform, you can create more intelligent actions across all your customer touchpoints. For example, you can tie your web data into your call centre data through a single profile. That way, your call centre agents know in real time what their web experience was before needing to call in. This can reduce the need for excessive questioning and increase call speed and volume — making everyone happier. Another aspect to consider is the value of zero-party data — the data customers give to your company in exchange for a better experience or enhanced benefits. Customers will tell you how they want to be contacted and where; if you’re listening, you can tie this data to their customer profiles to show how much you care about what they want from your brand. That’s how you turn omni-channel into a strategy that builds trust and loyalty in your customers. Dynamic Marketing Principle #5: DELIGHT Buyers expect businesses to know them; you need to be able to predict optimal experiences. In our digital age, that means putting data to good use to turn what we know about customers into the experiences they will want. The ultimate goal of delighting your customers is to create the illusion of effortlessness, to replicate that feeling that the person you’re doing business with knows your needs before you do. Customers have learned to expect a certain level of frustration and friction; delighting them means removing those barriers and exceeding expectations. To do so, marketers need to be able to predict the moments that matter with machine learning. With your trusted, unified, real-time, omni-channel data foundation in place, machine learning insights are the logical next step to improve your marketing initiatives. However, machine learning can seem improbable for marketers. When over three-quarters of ML
projects stall before deployment, it can seem like a far-off dream to achieve. But when you embed machine learning capabilities into upstream customer data technology like a Customer Data Platform, you’re solving one of the biggest barriers to machine learning already: the availability of clean data. With an ML-powered CDP, you can enable your whole tech stack with predictive insights. You can anticipate when a customer will make a purchase and take action to increase revenue or identify prospects who won’t purchase and suppress them from advertising to save costs. With machine learning on board, marketers have the power to deliver predictive experiences at speed and scale. It will make personalization, which has long been a goal for marketers, not only possible, but it will make it profitable. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of marketers that have invested in personalization will abandon it by 2025, naming lack of ROI and data management challenges as key barriers. But with the Dynamic Marketing framework laid out here, demonstrating ROI and overcoming data management challenges are more than just possible by 2025 — companies are doing it today. Companies are using machine learning to delight customers in new ways. One way is using machine learning to predict which customers have a high likelihood to purchase and offering a discount on items they have an affinity for to increase conversions. And for customers who are struggling with the website, predictive insights can trigger proactive customer service for people who are more likely to call into the customer service centre. Machine learning will transform the way marketers work in the years to come. As part of the Dynamic Marketing approach, it will help you delight your buyers in new ways — with less effort — as you predict the moments that matter to them. KAREN NAVES is SVP of Global Demand Generation & Marketing Operations with Tealium Inc.
DECEMBER 2023
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LOYALTY PROGRAMS
It’s Time to
Reinvent Travel Loyalty BY LIDIYA CHAPPLE, CLAY COWAN, ELLEN SCULLY, AND JILLIAN TELLEZ HOLUB
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ravel Invented loyalty as we know it. Now it’s time for reinvention. Members of travel brands’ loyalty programs have become increasingly disloyal. The question seeking answers is “What will bring these straying customers back? Travel brands didn’t invent loyalty programs, which have been traced to as far back as the 18th century. But ever since the first major airline frequent flier programs appeared in the early 1980s — soon to be followed by similar programs from hotel chains — the travel industry has become known for letting customers accumulate redeemable “miles” and “points.” Modern-day voyagers are deeply familiar with loyalty-related concepts such as status tiers, members-only lounges, and pointearning credit cards. Travel loyalty programs were originally designed to influence travelers’ behavior. By offering rewards such as free flights and hotel rooms to frequent customers, a company might convince power users to consolidate their travel spending with its brand. Why fly airline X when you’re halfway to earning a free perk for remaining faithful to airline Y? Over time, many travel loyalty programs became wildly successful — not just as a way to boost sales or strengthen customer relationships but as major profit centers in their own right. Travel companies found they could sell loyalty points in bulk to, for instance, banks, which in turn offered the points to their credit card customers as rewards for spending. In 2019, United’s MileagePlus loyalty program sold $3.8 billion worth of miles to third parties, which accounted for 12 percent of the airline’s total revenue for that year. In 2022, American Airlines’ loyalty program brought in $3.1 billion in revenue, DMN.CA ❰
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LOYALTY PROGRAMS and Marriott’s brought in $2.7 billion.3 Many loyalty programs have evolved into discrete divisions with their own profit-and-loss ledgers. Along the way, however, some travel players have shifted their focus away from the original purpose of these programs. As loyalty programs have become powerful bottom-line enhancers, companies have sometimes been tempted to view them first and foremost as revenue generators instead of tools to sway customers’ behavior or to improve customers’ experiences. The post-pandemic resurgence of travel demand has also pressured companies to shore up their loyalty programs’ viability by devaluing members’ points and miles and enacting rule changes that have at times caused customer frustration. At the same time, innovative loyalty programs in other industries are raising the bar, opening customers’ eyes to the value that loyalty programs can offer. As a result of these factors, travel loyalty program members have become increasingly disloyal. For some customers, reaching the top tier of a loyalty program is still almost a facet of their personal identities — Just a couple of more flights, and I’ll reach elite status! But many loyalty program members now seem more inclined to play the field. The warm feelings at the heart of loyalty, which lead travelers to show allegiance to a brand and trust that their faithful behavior will be noticed, seem to fade when brands let their focus drift away from rewarding their most valuable and consistent customers. Loyalty is about more than a program, a department, or a tangible redemption offer. Loyalty is about more than a program, a department, or a tangible redemption offer. True loyalty is won through a genuine desire to forge bonds with customers and thereby maximize each customer’s lifetime value to the brand. Travel brands, therefore, should consider rethinking and reinventing their loyalty programs in ways that frame loyalty as something more than points and miles. A mindset shift, coupled with three practical actions, could help restore the luster of loyalty programs while bringing straying customers back into the fold. ❱ DMN.CA
A mindset shift, coupled with three actions, could restore the luster of loyalty programs while bringing customers back into the fold. How we got here: Disruption, devaluation, and dissatisfaction When travel came to a halt as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many travel brands — hoping to keep customers happy — “froze” the loyalty program status levels of members who
with an eye toward programs’ profit-and-loss statements. But collectively, they’ve resulted in widespread customer dissatisfaction. Program members have chafed at having their points devalued and benefits clawed back. Meanwhile, successful loyalty programs in other sectors have opened customers’ eyes to other types of value that these programs can provide, such as better customer experiences, richer communities, more tailored
on its company’s earnings. This is because so much of a modern travel loyalty program’s importance comes from B2B sales of batched points or miles. The programs’ most relevant customers in terms of generating revenue are credit card companies, not individual travelers. And these B2B deals generally involve long-term contracts that guarantee sales years in advance. A travel brand can unilaterally issue more loyalty program points to sell to
EXHIBIT 1
might have otherwise lost perks due to a lack of travel activity. When travel spending was slow to resume, brands changed their program rules to make status tiers significantly easier to reach and maintain. These moves made sense in the face of an unprecedented disruption, with far fewer miles and points being redeemed. But as travel recovered, loyalty programs became burdened by increased redemptions and overpopulated high-status tiers (evidenced, for example, by the lines outside the doors of airport lounges). Some major travel brands have responded by adjusting loyalty program rules. They’ve ended the status extensions that were granted during the pandemic, and they’ve devalued points and miles — raising the bar to redeem them for free flights and rooms. All these changes have, understandably, been made
personalization, and exclusive access to events or offers. Loyalty surveys conducted by McKinsey in 20214 and 20235 revealed a steep decline in the likelihood that a customer would recommend airline, hotel, and cruise line loyalty programs to a friend or colleague—even though the likelihood that customers would recommend the airline, hotel, and cruise line brands remained relatively steady (Exhibit 1). The likelihood that customers would recommend travel loyalty programs has declined steeply over a two-year period. A focus on a loyalty program’s bottom line can distract from its higher purpose A travel loyalty program might be able — at least temporarily — to disappoint its members while inflicting minimal damage
third parties at any time, as well as raise the redemption levels for flights or rooms if margins become undesirable. Meanwhile, airline travelers have fewer options than they did in the past. Consolidation of major airline brands means it’s harder for frequent fliers to abandon one airline and its loyalty program for another without losing access to convenient flight routes or departure times. And customers who have already banked a large number of miles or points with one airline or hotel program can feel locked in. For all these reasons, loyalty programs appear to be in a position of strength. But a narrowed emphasis on revenue and costs could lead to brands’ losing focus of the big picture. Travel loyalty programs were originally conceived as a clever way to influence customer behavior — and DECEMBER 2023
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LOYALTY PROGRAMS encourage customer loyalty. But it’s not clear if the programs are currently fulfilling either mandate as successfully as they could.
If this trend continues, it could eventually create a vicious cycle: airlines would cut loyalty program budgets if they deemed them
(Exhibit 3). Hotel, cruise, and airline travelers are typically members of about three or four different loyalty programs within
EXHIBIT 2
Loyalty program members tend to play the field. Evidence suggests this trend will persist. According to our 2023 survey on travel loyalty, younger generations are more likely to consider and transact with multiple travel players. Gen Zers and millennials consider about 1.7 times as many brands as do baby boomers and the Silent Generation and transact with about 1.3 times as many brands. All this comes at a time when the travel loyalty market is becoming more competitive. Consumer banks, which were once content to offer cobranded credit cards featuring travel brands as the marquee partner, are now launching their own self-branded travel awards ecosystems and booking platforms. Travelers might wonder why they should put all their loyalty points in one basket with a single airline or hotel brand when a consumer bank might offer more flexible rewards redemption and possibly a better user experience. (It’s worth noting that our research suggests the likelihood that a customer would recommend some of the major consumer banks with travel loyalty initiatives to a friend or colleague is far higher than the likelihood that a customer would recommend a cruise line, lodging brand, or airline.)
EXHIBIT 3
McKinsey research reveals that airline loyalty programs’ ability to change fliers’ behavior declined between 2017 and 2021, and again between 2021 and 2023 (Exhibit 2). During those time frames, it became less likely that a customer who was a member of a given airline loyalty program would report that they chose the associated airline over other options or increased the frequency of their spending with that airline. DECEMBER 2023
and 60 percent in airlines—with the remainder of the customer’s spending spread around to other players within the same sector.
ineffective at influencing customer behavior, lower budgets would lead to reduced program benefits, and less attractive benefits would result in customers perceiving program participation as having less value. Airline loyalty programs are driving fewer customer behavior changes. McKinsey research further shows that loyalty program members these days aren’t especially loyal
a given sector, our analysis finds. On a yearly basis, they consider traveling with about three different brands within that sector and ultimately transact with more than one of them. Travelers don’t even consolidate their spending with the brand they say they “prefer” within a sector: the median share of the customer’s wallet for preferred brands is only about 50 percent in lodging, 60 percent in cruise lines,
How to reshape loyalty for a new travel landscape Our research finds that experience — far more than tangible, “earn and burn” benefits — is what wins customers’ loyalty. Experiential factors, including “offering an experience worth paying more for” and “feeling taken care of,” have become more important over time and now account for three of the top five (out of more than 40) drivers of loyalty to cruise lines, hotels, and airlines. For hotels, experience has four times more impact than tangible benefits on purchase frequency, while for airlines, experience is more than twice as likely to influence frequency. Positive past experiences are the biggest factor in customers’ desire to travel more DMN.CA ❰
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LOYALTY PROGRAMS
Put experience at the core of loyalty programs When our 2023 survey asked American respondents which company they’re most loyal to, Amazon received more votes than the top six travel players combined — despite the absence of any traditional, points-based loyalty program. How does Amazon win loyalty? By providing a frictionless experience. How can travel brands learn from this and win customers’ love even when points and miles are worth less? By offering distinctive, satisfying experiences: making customers feel delighted is the key to their hearts, but McKinsey’s 2023 loyalty survey showed that only 20 percent of travelers were delighted by a recent travel experience. Companies should strive to design loyalty programs around experiential benefits that make travelers feel special. This can be win–win, such as when Delta offered free in-flight Wi-Fi to loyalty members, which led to a better experience for the members while also boosting enrollment in Delta’s loyalty program. In retail, some programs bring together engaged communities of like-minded brand loyalists. Advance notice or exclusive access to offers can send loyalty members a signal that the brand considers them VIPs. Brands should seamlessly integrate customer experiences between desktop, mobile, and physical locations — meaning that frontline workers have an important role to play. Proper execution of customer service is vital for getting experiences right, so companies should try to keep frontline workers top of mind. Workers should be given the proper training and tools to satisfy customers, and the effectiveness of this training should be measured. When it comes to mitigating, or avoiding, a negative customer experience, saying “sorry” can go a very long way. Companies should proactively engage customers after service shortfalls, as a service ❱ DMN.CA
challenge can actually lead to an increase in customer satisfaction if handled well. The form an apology takes might be made commensurate with a customer’s status level in the brand’s loyalty program, and any recompense can be informed by a predictive analysis of its impact—considering factors such as the magnitude of the lapse and the nature of the customer’s other recent interactions with the brand.
turn, personalization can drive engagement, as seen in Sephora’s Pocket Contour Class initiative, which lets users upload a selfie to get personalized makeup tips. Personalization can be employed to tailor both experiences and offers for loyalty members. Our research has shown that 78 percent of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase when offered a personalized experience. The goal should be
(Finally) use data to offer personalization to members Travel brands have long had access to reams of customer data. Loyalty program members surf on travel companies’ Wi-Fi, sleep in their hotel rooms, fly on their planes, and cruise on their ships. But many travel brands haven’t yet captured the opportunity to use these unique data to offer their members personalization on par with other industries. Likewise, although airlines and hotels have incredibly sophisticated, lightning fast, AI-enabled pricing algorithms, they aren’t consistently harnessing their technology capabilities to power real-time customer personalization. Nontransactional engagement opportunities, such as the daily interactions fostered by social communities, offer rich troves of data that can be used to hone personalization. In
to achieve a hypersegmentation of program members that’s so nuanced, it results in a “segment of one.”
ISTOCK/ GOLDEN SIKORKA
with a company in the future. The following three steps could help travel brands adjust to this changing landscape and engender loyalty that goes beyond a mere quest for redemptions and perks.
Rethink partnerships to protect self-interests while delivering customer value Since the 1980s, travel companies have been partnering with banks to launch cobranded credit cards. But several credit card brands now offer their own, self-branded travel rewards ecosystems. These ecosystems sometimes direct bookings to airlines, hotels, and cruise lines — but they can also serve as a way for credit card brands to steal away travelers’ loyalties. These types of transactional partnerships with consumer banks might eventually cease to be a winning play for travel companies. In time, travel loyalty programs could be driven to seek alternate sources of funding.
The best kinds of partnerships build richer connections with consumers while boosting engagement through thoughtful collaborations. Uber’s partnership with Marriott gives users the option to link the brands’ loyalty programs, tapping into two large customer bases and providing more convenient travel experiences. One promising recent example of collaboration is a travel media network. A hotel company might, for instance, launch a media network that allows thirdparty brands to place relevant, nonintrusive, personalized advertisements in the hotelier’s owned spaces — websites, hotel lobbies, guest room TVs, and so forth. This type of partnership can offer travelers an elegant, curated experience while providing the travel brand with an alternate monetization route. In general, travel companies should cultivate collaborations that protect their interests, generate new revenue streams, add personalization and value for loyal customers, and diversify touchpoints with those customers. Early action could prove vital here, as the travel space will not accommodate infinite partner ecosystems. As other industries raise the bar and consumers grow increasingly dissatisfied with travel loyalty programs as they are designed today, travel industry leaders may need to ask themselves some hard questions. How can points and miles be paired with experiences and excitement? Which partners are truly adding value? What is causing customers to stray, and how can their loyalties be won back? Travel brands were loyalty innovators. But travel loyalty programs might soon hit an inflection point. Now is the time to innovate and win back customers’ allegiances. LIDIYA CHAPPLE is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, where JILLIAN TELLEZ HOLUB is a partner; CLAY COWAN is a partner in the Dallas office; and ELLEN SCULLY is a consultant in the Seattle office. The authors wish to thank Bella Alfaro, Alex Cosmas, Marilyne Crépeau, Oren Eizenman, Austin Hack, Ryan Mann, Jacob Miller, Afiya Romeo, Matthew Straus, and Jamie Wilkie for their contributions to this article.
DECEMBER 2023
Resource Directory
Date:
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DATA ANALYTICS
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MEDIA CHANNELS
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Should Your Agency Say Goodbye to Social Media? BY LISA D. JENKINS
A
re your clients questioning the value of social media? Wondering if you should reconsider offering social media services? In this article, you’ll discover why and how an agency discontinued its social media marketing services. The challenges of social media marketing for small businesses Social media marketing has become an indispensable part of most marketing strategies. However, managing social media can require significant time and resources — which may not be feasible for small businesses and agencies catering to them. Jamie Teasdale, founder of Propel BusinessWorks, discovered social media services come with several hidden Jamie Teasdale is the challenges. founder of Propel Businessworks, a digital In 2009, the marketing company that down economy lends insight and creativity to small businesses, giving was snuffing out a them tools they need to lot of businesses. plan, promote, and prosper. Solopreneurs and small businesses were wondering how they’d survive. Jamie took this as an opportunity to start her agency. Propel BusinessWorks’ mission is to help small businesses plan, promote, and prosper on their own terms. In the early days, Jamie got a lot of requests for social media services, and it seemed to her like a lucrative opportunity to grow her agency’s revenue. She already offered services like brand strategy, website design, content planning, and email marketing. As social media marketing gained popularity, she added it to her roster of services. Every business needs a Facebook page and Twitter handle, right? So, her agency included strategy, content creation, community management, ❱ DMN.CA
and advertising. For many years, social media marketing formed a significant portion of Propel’s revenue. However, over time, Jamie realized social media marketing was becoming more of an Achilles heel than an asset for her company — they were unable to execute social media marketing well for their client base of solopreneurs and micro businesses. There were several key challenges: ❯ Limited Budgets: Propel’s small and micro business clients did not have large marketing budgets. The bottom-line budget for monthly fees or ad spends they could afford was not enough for Jamie and her team to properly manage their social media. Of course, you can discount your rates. But soon, you might find yourself working extra hours for little additional pay. Your client may also not be happy with the quality of output. ❯ Significant Time Commitment: Managing social media well requires a significant amount of time for creative content creation, community management, campaign management, and in-depth analytics. Jamie found that her clients were unwilling to pay for the actual time needed to manage their social media. ❯ Platform Instability: The social media landscape has changed drastically in the past few years. The platforms change their algorithms and introduce new features frequently. Jamie and her team found it difficult to keep up with all these changes while also handling client work. She did not want to deliver subpar results or risk damaging her agency’s reputation. ❯ Pay to Play: Organic reach on social platforms has reduced drastically. Businesses now need to spend considerable amounts on advertising to gain visibility. As an
agency catering to solopreneurs and small and micro businesses, this is tremendously difficult, if not impossible. ❯ Low-Value Perception: Your clients may not see value in community management and social engagement. They may care only about vanity metrics like followers and likes. This mismatch in expectations makes it difficult to demonstrate ROI to your clients. Why pulling the plug on social media services may be wise Given these challenges, Propel decided to stop offering social media marketing altogether. For Jamie, this decision was driven by her responsibility to do right by clients and her team. She felt she could not deliver results commensurate with the time and cost. Over time, social media became more of a chore than a passion for Jamie and her team. While some of Propel’s clients proactively asked to be pulled back from social media, Jamie and her team transitioned some existing clients to alternative strategies. Focusing on their core values and expertise, they pivoted their marketing efforts to things like email marketing and SEO. They knew their clients could use their ad dollars in different ways and still get people’s attention. Depending on rented land like Facebook and Instagram is always risky. Jamie recommends focusing on your owned platforms like your website, email list, and blog to help you control your marketing efforts. You get to set the rules versus constantly adapting to others’ rules. This move led to some shortterm revenue loss but gave Propel the freedom to niche down and focus on its strengths like branding and web design. Eliminating social media unlocked the capacity for Jamie and her team to take on more profitable work aligned with their passions and values.
Advice for other agencies reconsidering their social media services Social media is a huge part of the marketing world, undoubtedly. It should be conducted cautiously, carefully, and thoroughly. Jamie believes if you aren’t focusing on your social media services in those ways, how well can you execute them and help your clients succeed with them? “I think from my standpoint, if you cannot do it well and put food on your own table… If you are discounting your services because the client can’t afford it and you are working 80 hours a week, just trying to make it happen, is that worth it for you?” Jamie explains. Once, Jamie had her own personal Instagram account that was suddenly banned. She repeatedly tried to contact someone at IG, but her messages went unanswered. It was only after threatening legal action her profile returned. She took this as a sign to not feed the social media beast any longer and took all of her content back into her own hands by blogging on Propel’s website. She encourages small businesses to do the same. Small businesses don’t need to be on all the social platforms like everyone else is. She believes they need to think about how they can be authentic with their brand and not just plug content into a machine just because they think they need to be there. Instead, Jamie recommends considering each platform’s purpose, who’s on them, and where your business fits in — “push pause, assess where you’re at, take stock of your priorities… and take the foot off the pedal of obligation.” LISA D. JENKINS is the director of editorial at Social Media Examiner. Her expertise in social media comes from years of serving destination organizations and businesses in the travel and tourism industry. This article first appeared in the Social Media Examiner. DECEMBER 2023
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33.4% Index:124
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