“We’re in a crisis situation, there’s not enough talent coming through the pipeline and organisations will experience difficulties,” she said in an exclusive interview with the Market Research Society, of which she is a patron.

“We need people to take maths and sciences,” she urged.

And in terms of how that manifests itself within marketing she pointed to problems in infrastructure.

“We still don’t have a customer director within an organisation; we don’t have the voice or face of the customer sitting on the board of directors. Is it the marketing director or the IT director? I don’t think that’s been resolved,” she said.

“The truth is, data is a very creative science; being in IT does not make you better at data. Some knowledge of marketing is very important to understand customer data but a lot of marketers are not very numerate – it’s a big challenge for the future.”

You can watch the full interview at www.mrs.org.uk/dataskills.