The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability

AWARENESS AND INFORMATION RELEVANCY

Assuming a message is appropriately delivered at a technical level, the next most important thing is to ensure that it contains a high level of informational relevancy. The audience needs to be able to understand it within their personal interpretative context; if they do not, at best they will be confused. This message needs to be aligned to their motivators; otherwise they will not be interested in even considering it. To explain what this means in practice, let’s revisit the example from earlier in this chapter.

Fundamentally, the analytics team was interested in encouraging the marketing team to change its processes. The analytics team had built a model that had a high level of accuracy and, by embedding it within the marketing team’s operational processes, the team expected to see a substantial improvement in targeting efficiency.

Both teams had high motivational alignment; each was being benchmarked on the accuracy of its marketing efforts. Despite this, the two teams had been unable to get past each other’s apparent ignorance. The critical thing they were missing was the ability to relate the activities of the two groups to each other.

If someone cannot make the information he has received relevant to his personal context, he is unlikely to pay any attention to it. Our two most important considerations are normally whether:

1. We can comprehend what is being said or relate it to our context

2. It aligns to our personal motivations