The data currency

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For marketers from my background to thrive in a digital and data-oriented world, you have to be willing to accept that what you’ve been told is wrong. Everything you thought to be true, isn’t,” declares Dominic Grounsell, Travelex’s global marketing director.

During his 15 years in the profession, Grounsell has been on a journey of discovery – one that’s been heavily influenced by the role of data in marketing. 

He started with that classic marketing training – Unilever’s graduate programme – very much centred on the FMCG rule book of branding and communications. But in the intervening years, Grounsell has moved within telecommunications and financial services, and, consequently, the role and importance of data in determining marketing strategy has grown considerably, reaching a zenith in his current role at foreign exchange company Travelex. 

“I’m constantly amazed that many of the accepted wisdoms of FMCG still pervade our market, despite the fact that the data doesn’t always back it up,” says Grounsell. “I was always told that meeting that emotional benefit was the Holy Grail.”

But, he argues, that truth only applies in heavily commoditised markets where product parity is the norm. “In other markets, where it’s easier to get product differentiation, a functional benefit is more powerful than an emotional benefit – and demonstrably so.”

Neutral intent 

During Grounsell’s time at Unilever, marketing was “judgement-based and very qualitative… and data wasn’t really anything that we talked about from a marketing standpoint”, but when he joined Capital One, that all changed.

“That’s an incredibly data-driven business and is analytical in its DNA,” Grounsell says. “It was painful at first, because it was a huge culture shock. I went from a world where I was used to throwing tens of millions at campaigns without much oversight, and to having your judgement accepted, to a world where every decision I was making as a marketer was questioned on the basis of whether it was actually going to deliver a return... and not just showing a sales uplift on a chart, but real analytical certainty around statistical significance. The burden of proof and justification went up exponentially.” 

More importantly, at Capital One Grounsell was introduced to the concept of neutral intent. “It was explained to me at a moment of intense frustration, when I was dealing with a young guy whose background was in maths and physics, and who was trying to explain to me why my marketing strategy was wrong. We didn’t have a very productive conversation, to put it mildly. 

“Afterwards my boss said, ‘you have to understand that he comes at things with neutral intent; he doesn’t believe anything until he has proven it analytically and statistically. It doesn’t mean he’s criticising your judgement’. It was a real wake-up call. It unlocked my ability to work in that business because it opened my eyes – and it’s liberating to think that way.”

Grounsell’s data epiphany stood him in good stead for his current role at Travelex, which is going through a transformation, having grown rapidly from its single store in Southampton Row, London, in 1976, to the 1,500-store global player it is today.

Brand repositioning 

Travelex is a diversified business, working in the B2C arena with its retail estate, and in B2B with direct services to its partners – which range from international banks to retailers. 

It is growing and adapting to a vision of where it sees success lying in the future, which Grounsell says involves technology, digital and the customer. But it also involves a repositioning of the brand, focusing on its products and services and the brand experience it delivers to its customers. To implement this, Travelex has worked with consultancy EatBigFish, the results of which are starting to come to fruition. 

“It is a challenge, but one of the great things about brand strategy – the reason why it’s more art than science – is that it’s the ultimate distillation exercise,” says Grounsell. “It’s the ability to take what is a very complicated story about what your business is trying to do, and put it into a simple framework that will help everyone in the business to connect. 

“It’s a terrifying endeavour because you’re in the conception zone – do you believe this idea, is it motivating? And the more you expose it to people, the more you get very subjective reactions. But so far so good for us.”

Grounsell isn’t going for a big reveal; instead, the exercise is all about how the repositioning influences the business gradually, over time, and how it galvanises all employees to move in the same direction. “If our commercial and business strategy is what we’re trying to achieve, how do we help people connect to that and understand how they play a role in it for the customer? The brand is the how and the why.”

Taking stock 

In addition, the repositioning is designed to help build pride among employees and show how the company has evolved. “When you’re forging ahead with a growth trajectory like we’ve had, it’s easy not to take stock of where you all are as you move to the next thing,” says Grounsell. “One of the great things about this brand strategy exercise has been our ability to take a step back and go ‘wow, we do some amazing stuff’ – and when you put it all together in a story, it’s really motivating.”

Grounsell is thriving in a growing business after several years in financial services, where the focus was, at best, on battening down the hatches and, more often, on cutting back.

Not that Travelex is immune to macro-economic forces – “anything that affects travel affects our business” – particularly on the consumer side of the business. But this is where data comes to the rescue. 

Travelex operates in an almost stock-market-like fashion, with currency prices constantly monitored and set – and this happens across more than 90 currencies, where prices are changing every day, in multiple countries. This inevitably affects marketing. 

“You have no certainty of what’s going to happen at any one time, so it drives a particular style of how you manage your investment – in how you think about the marketing strategy,” says Grounsell. “You have to be pragmatic because you’re having to move and make decisions on a daily basis. I love that style of marketing, although it’s not as stress-free as I would like sometimes.”

This dynamic environment means data-driven insight is all the more vital, particularly when looking at channel performance – “small swings in the relative margin in the price of the currency, plus the margin we have to apply to make a profit, can change conversion dynamics significantly in our different markets”.

Analysing and interpreting the data requires particular knowledge, and this means the skill set of the people Travelex employs is changing – and it’s certainly different from the marketing Grounsell first learned. His reliance on data and quick-paced interpretation may make uncomfortable reading for some; as he admits, his use of traditional market research has all but stopped. “Big set-piece qual and quant doesn’t work for us,” he says. 

“We operate in an agile environment where you want to generate insight on a constant basis around iteration on a certain week. In some cases, the guys are working on their own judgement so they can move quickly, or we’re doing very-fast-cycle customer research – get it in front of customers, move on. 

“We have used external agencies for some things, but – from a cost and benefit point of view  – it doesn’t make sense for us always to go outside. We can co-opt a number of customers ourselves; we’ve got a testing room where they come in and play with some products, and we film them and get the insight – that gives us the grist for the next week’s development. It has to be real-time to match the production cycles of the technology business.”

While Grounsell admits this format may not always be representative – “acknowledging all the bias issues that researchers may throw at us” – speed is often the deciding factor now. He’s been experimenting with different forms of testing with a variety of users, such as beta testing groups on Facebook, which he likes because the users are so engaged. Grounsell also cites the pretotyping technique, which allows you to test and learn with a product without having to build it – “essentially, how do you shortcut the process in order to get validation that what you want to build is the right thing?”

Swayed by results 

As a committed ‘data convert’, Grounsell’s relationship with – and attitude toward – classic TV advertising has shifted; he is now militant about the need for rigorous proof of results in any form of marketing communication.

“We often overlook that – in many categories – marketing is not taken seriously, and I think that’s a crying shame,” he says. “One of the ways we avoid this is data – being closer to the data, closer to the insight, closer to what’s driving return for the organisation and being seen as talking the language of the business, which is data, numbers and financials.” 

Grounsell has been swayed purely by the results. “At one point at Capital One, the most efficient marketing placement that we were running was a four-word text link on the top of the MSN homepage. It drove unbelievable amounts of volume at the most ridiculous efficiency. But if you had asked me, as a brand marketer, do I think that’s a valuable piece of marketing, I would have said no, because where’s the emotional attachment? Where’s the communication of the benefit? 

“It was just a very simple message about the product, and it drove huge volume – but you would only understand that if you took the time to look at the performance of that link. At Capital One, such was the quality of analysis being done by my marketing analysts, we could see impression-level profitability.”

So it’s not surprising that – in the current debate raging in marketing and advertising circles about whether data is killing creativity – Grounsell falls firmly in the ‘no’ camp. 

“I have seen the great and the good of the advertising world stand up and say that data is killing creativity, because – in my view – it threatens their ability to say ‘trust me, I know best’,” he says. 

“In a world of TV advertising, we have prevailed with this paternalistic, David Ogilvy view, that creative directors are the all-seeing eye of how to express your product and how to sell something. 

“For every [Cadbury] Gorilla or [Compare the Market] Meerkat, there are a thousand pieces of crap that do nothing for brands and nothing for sales. I have made my fair share of poor ads on the basis of what I was told, creatively, was going to be brilliant. 

“The ability to interrogate what really does and doesn’t work reduces the risk; it allows me to defend decisions. So the data will actually allow me to do more creative things. It will enable the creative director who’s moaning about the data to do more of what they want to do – if, and only if, the ads they tell me will work, work. 

“I have never seen a creative director explain, internally to my business, why an ad hasn’t worked. They are not up to coming in and sharing the pain – they only want to share the gain.” Grounsell’s data journey looks set to continue for some time yet.