Big Data Marketing: Engage Your Customers More Effectively and Drive Value

Chapter 10

Step Five

Process Is the New Black

Source: © Teradata 2013

Marketers aren't generally the type to consider business processes to be sexy. Who wants to waste time with process—a term defined as “a series of logically related tasks performed to produce a defined set of results”¹—when they could be focusing on more exciting and strategic initiatives, like the next great creative campaign or a killer product launch?

However, I believe that it's time for a shift in that mindset. In this chapter, I'm going to prove that process is sexy. I'll show why process is the new black, and I'll explain that, without process, your marketing efforts to collect and analyze big data will fall short of expectations, every single time. Your company simply cannot move from the Dark Ages into the Enlightened Age of Data without having the proper processes in place.

Now, before we continue this discussion, let's make sure we're all on the same page. When I talk about today's marketing processes, I'm not talking about the old-fashioned way of doing business—you know, the way a marketer used to fill out a hard-copy job starter form to initiate a marketing project, cram that into a color-coded folder with a stack of other papers, and then walk it all to and fro to track down creative review and approvals. No, I'm not talking about that kind of process. By process, I mean modern, purpose-built marketing ...