Leverage Marketing Data to Create more than just Insights

Marketers who have spent most (or all) of their careers in the manufacturing industry know the importance of building strong relationships - of course with customers, but also with dealers, suppliers and internal teams. 

We recently had the honor to talk with Gary Lancina, Vice President of Product Management & Marketing for Briggs & Stratton, about using data to build trust to influence and motivate each of these influential audiences. His responses gave great insight and points of view on the topic of marketing data - keep reading to learn how to build trust with your data. 

Thanks for joining us today Gary - maybe you could start by talking about how you got into the field of marketing.

My interest in marketing stemmed from graduate school, and the marketing classes were the most interesting bits of work. What I appreciated was how marketing was able to weave together threads from the different functions of the company. You've got to be cognizant and capable of managing innovation and finances and insights and research and operations, and ultimately craft the value proposition and communicate in such a way that you win competitively.

Marketing is a spot where you can keep score and drive a sense of fundamental outcomes for enterprise sales, profit and market share. How big are we getting? How much value are we delivering? Are we out competing our competition, and winning with the customers we serve?

Does that cross-department view help define your current role leading both product management and marketing? Can you use that ability to pull the different teams together and tell a larger story?

Organizations use those labels slightly differently. I've worked in a number of different environments, and in some cases, a brand manager will be accountable for the product and how it's communicated. There are also companies that have a clear delineation between the two. Where I am at Briggs & Stratton, the team is actually split up. We have a group of people who focus specifically on the value proposition. What is our product line? How do we innovate? How do we continue to evolve and deliver better value? And then right alongside them, we've got the marketing communications professionals who take that value proposition and articulate it aligned with our brands to reach the right audiences.

In my case, I appreciate having accountability for both, because I think the collaboration between the two is where the magic happens. I think there's a little bit of a danger when product managers feel like once they’ve finished engineering, they’re done. Or similarly when the marketing communications people decide to just run a cool advertising campaign. But the connection between the two, the joining up of their objectives, that's when teams actually start to have feedback loops and understand, based on the appeal that they’re seeing, opportunities for additional enhancement in the value proposition. Which in turn drives new product development. That's the kind of interplay and dialog that we’ve set up and can leverage.

In some ways, your marketing team is working alongside the product team to generate demand. Is the marketing group deciding what channels to invest in and how you're going to market?

We try to think comprehensively about the go to market elements, and there's a ton of value in collaborating with the sales teams on their business development functions. We also include account management as we look at the different customer groups and end user segments that we serve, and our message articulation through advertising and social media, our programs and the promotions that we offer.

How we think about winning in the marketplace is central to our marketers. I tend to look at the markets we serve and the market conditions either bolster or hinder our growth, depending on whether a particular segment is expanding or maybe in a contraction mode. But even in tight times, there's opportunity for growth through market share expansion. How do we switch someone from a competitive product to ours? How can we win against the forces that the market segment might be giving us?

The benefit of that is if you can succeed even in those tight times - the marketing, the commitment to the brand that's developed - that pays huge dividends when the market conditions are more favorable because you've got more momentum going into it. 

Your teams are pulling together a variety of insights across various departments to make go-to-market decisions. How does data help guide those decisions?

Data is one of those things that gets bandied about pretty casually and the reality is that it's not always easy to get. It's fundamental and I think the aspiration is to always have data-informed choice so that we're not just relying on intuition. There's a real danger of being self-isolating and relying on smart people or experienced people and getting their recommendation. Experience is part of the solution, but the role of data can challenge long standing assumptions and provide insights that are enlightening and perhaps open up possibilities or considerations that hadn't previously been taken. 

In our case, we try to tap into whatever available syndicated data there is on a particular industry or retail channel. We'll also augment through our own research and analysis and on customer relationships and user preferences, There's not a single data source out there that is completely enlightening and provides all the clarity we need.

Which means half the battle is accessing the data. The other half is interrogating it; making sure that it's robust enough. And then, with those two lenses, understanding what's available and how strong it is when blended together with the other data to actually gain valuable insights. 

People tend to underestimate how challenging it can be to gather data from different sources. Once you have data from different places, how do you compare and contrast it to make solid business decisions?

In some industries, like consumer packaged goods, there's a ton of very robust data. You can access the barcodes that are scanned across a grocery store cash register, and you can see sales activity. This is rich data that people have a lot of confidence in. But as you get into the industries we serve at Briggs & Stratton, in some cases we have access to retailer data, but in other cases, we don't. Some industrial, commercial or niche markets don’t have the infrastructure and scale to provide that robust syndication, so you have to be more creative. There may be surveys or tapping into a customer’s transaction history. That is where art and science come together to make for interesting conversations and ultimately, the power of a team to come to a conclusion.

When you’re compiling your analysis and putting your data to use, do you feel like your sales team and retail partners understand the data and go along with it, or do they push back in any way on the data that you're sharing?

Well, first of all, I would say that the collaboration and partnership here at Briggs & Stratton between sales and marketing is exemplary. One of the reasons that I enjoy the work I do is because we genuinely feel like we're in this together. We win together. We go into battle together with the competition. And inherent in that is a belief in the power of those insights, in the numbers that we see and in the analysis that we can do. Of course the debate, the discourse and the creative contention is around what these numbers actually tell us. 

That's where for me, the value comes in because I might be working with a senior member of the sales team who's looking at the data and can share insights into what’s happening. We may not have even considered that sort of historical perspective. So then you start to say, “How might we get some better perspective on this? Should we engage with our retailers?” The data itself is interesting, but the dialog based on our hypothesis and our insights is where true value is created.

I think everybody's bought into the need for rich streams of data. But together, let's understand what the limitations of any single source is, and then use those different streams and different perspectives to paint a picture of what we believe is happening. 

Without revealing confidential details, I can share that we had an instance earlier this year when we had certain data that was leading us to a hypothesis. We conducted dedicated market research on it that partially validated the hypothesis, but also opened up some other insights for us. And that, to me, is an example of the collaboration that we can then take to our customers and say, here's what we're seeing happening in your market and how we think you might better serve your customers.

That's ultimately that kind of collaboration that builds commitment in a relationship. The ability to say “We're seeing things, how are you seeing things? Now what do we do about it?” That's also part of the formula of building a level of appreciation and commitment that it turns into market share or share of the portfolio with key customers.

When you can pull all of those different insights together, you’re not providing a crystal ball, but if you provide enough accurate insight over time, then your team will realize and believe that this data is going to help lead them in the right direction.

Which is all rooted in a level of trust - what holds true in personal relationships holds true in business ones as well. The higher the level of trust, the greater the value of the relationship. Whether it's transactional streams, whether it's attitude trends and usage over time, whether it's brand perspective, no matter the topic, it’s the transparency around what the data is, the dialog around the insights, and the collaboration that builds trust.

And ultimately, that's where we want to get. We want to be the trusted partner for our customers. We want to be the ones that they can rely on for honest and clear headed views of trends or changes or shifts or opportunities. 

Trust is an interesting topic to land on, because I was going to switch into generative AI, and people are divided on the topic of trusting AI. Are you using it at all in your marketing?

We're in the early days of AI. Artificial intelligence has transitioned increasingly from being kind of an interesting toy, into a tool that delivers value in a lot of different ways. A lot of effort is being put into generating content and being able to tailor content.

Just as important is to understand how people are feeding a machine learning capability with data to see what it comes up with. We want to be very cognizant and aware of it without becoming too overly reliant or too trusting too soon. There are some pretty visible examples of bad content from what would otherwise be considered a sort of a leading edge AI solution.

We're learning our way into how to apply it and how to leverage it. 

We have witnessed those hallucinations firsthand in some of our training work also. What is interesting about AI is the new aspect that's gotten all the attention is content generation. But from a data perspective, being able to analyze large amounts of data to recognize patterns and trends is something that AI has been able to do for a long time.

The level of computational power and processing power that we can apply today versus state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is impressive. And again, applied appropriately, it's going to drive near-term advantages for people who know how to use it properly. People who get a little too reliant on AI may be led into some strange places. I've been tracking some of the media operators who are reducing the number of humans that are actually writing and allowing AI to generate articles and coverage of everything from sports teams to the daily political news.

It will be interesting to see how that aspect of it evolves, and again, bringing it back to trust. Because if someone is not paying attention, problems like hallucinations can go unnoticed. As I always say, we live in interesting times. We'll see how this continues to evolve.

I have one more question to ask you about data. How have you been successful balancing the customer’s desires for more personalization with the need for data privacy?

This is a topic that I've dealt with for many years, long before I got to Briggs & Stratton. The first thing is to always be aware of what compliance requirements are with any regulatory expectations, and ensure that the practices inside the enterprise adhere to those.

The second part is to be very transparent with people who may aspire or desire a greater level of personalization about what they're consenting to. Always check and use basic best practices, like double opt-ins, to confirm that people know they've signed up for communications. Users should understand the type of data being collected, whether it's related to transactions or behaviors on the website. Let people know that their permission is actually allowing for better value to be delivered to them.

When customers understand how we are going to utilize the data, that can play out in terms of a customer service call, or the ability to recognize a customer returning to the site and tailor an offer for them based on their preferences and behaviors. These small actions allow us to recognize the regulars, and show our appreciation to loyal customers.

There's real merit in that, especially in a time when there's so much turnover in different parts of the economy. Employee retention has been a challenge now for several years in different aspects of service delivery or customer experience, so that level of data-enabled interaction becomes a means to maintain the appreciation and level of value that's perceived by the customers we serve.

That’s exactly how we see personalization and privacy balancing - through a true value exchange. If you share your information, this is what you will get in exchange. If a customer is willing to reveal their data, they need to know it is going to be worth it.

I agree with that 100%. If somebody feels like they're being taken advantage of, you're taking my data, but I'm not getting any benefit from it, then there's an imbalance. And that's just like, again, in personal relationships, those types of imbalances are not leading to trust and commitment. Trust and commitment are two fundamental building blocks for a valuable, ongoing relationship.

That's a really great way to think about marketing in general. We are trying to build relationships with customers. Real people who we want to build a relationship with that is built on trust.

Marketing is all about relationships. Fundamentally it is nurturing and maintaining and evolving high trust, high commitment relationships - that’s central to what marketing is.