Does Your Dataset Have What Is Needed To Actually Identify Answers?

One of those vendor emails came out on Saturday. This is what was said.

"They just ran better offers".

"The data backs this up."

I believe the author.

I believe the author because vendors and digital experts do not live in a world where merchandise is properly analyzed. It's seldom included in the datasets needed to answer questions.

Allow me to give you two examples, real data.

Example #1:  I am working with a company that has +10% comp segment merchandise productivity and is contracting by 10% per year. If you have access to merchandising info, you quickly learn the company is failing from a customer acquisition standpoint but has great merchandise that is being bought at higher levels than last year. If you don't have access to merchandise performance, you'd try to correlate the -10% top-line issue to the data you actually collected, and you'd correlate an issue that is not "the" actual issue ... the actual issue is a structural customer acquisition issue (i.e. death of catalog co-ops).

Example #2:  I performed a Merchandise Dynamics analysis for a business. This business saw a 10% sales decline. Marketing spend was the same as prior year. No change in marketing tactics. Website traffic was the same. Conversion rates were down 10%. Digging into the data, it became clear that this brand killed off a bunch of winning items ... replacing them with? Fewer new items (i.e. nothing). Self-inflicted wounds. Now, if you take away the "carryover rate" of winning items ... if you remove it from the analysis and you don't have merchandising data available, you'd likely conclude that the website is failing the brand and you'd launch a sophomoric redesign that wouldn't solve the core problem.

I know, the digital folks are going to start howling and unsubscribing ... "he doesn't get it, offers matter and we aren't responsible for merchandise and even if we were we don't have access to the data, so don't listen to him". I hear this stuff all the time.

It doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Analyze "what" you sell. Incorporate "what" you sell into your digital marketing reporting efforts. The customer is not buying your offer, the customer is buying the merchandise you sell.