Marketing in Real Life

As a parent of a toddler boy, I've often found myself getting so frustrated, to a place I don't like, that I started doing some real self hard thinking about the causes (it’s the research background!). One of the major realizations I've had is that the frustration is in part because "working" with a toddler goes completely against how I spend most of my day as a marketer. And I know I'm not alone. In fact, I've seen lots of friends and colleagues who work with data struggle with toddler thinking. Don't get me wrong, parenting is obviously hard for everyone, but I wonder if it feels even harder for the modern marketer (or researcher) because of the way we are trained. We take pride in using data to identify what works and modifying what doesn’t. Unfortunately, my little dude seems to fall outside the realm of data integrity. Below are four things that are particularly confounding in our dual roles as parent and professional. 1) It's the journ...

Right now we’re conducting interviews to help finalize our upcoming analytics and reporting tool and one comment jumped out to me as a surprise. She said “it’s very green.” She’s right – being able to easily review and manipulate data on a screen sure beats printing out reams of data as part of your normal process. It is amazing how much paper is wasted in the creation of a normal research Power Point report. While admittedly it was not our intent, its nice to know that we’re doing our part to help! Have you thought about how you can reduce your printing?