Time to show the best side of analytics

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Another family ‘Zoom quiz’ comes to an end and the evening turns into a debate about the latest debrief from the government. My household is watching the daily presentations fuelled by data, delivered in PowerPoint slides and with recommendations created from analytics to find the best way forward. This might be as close as they get to seeing what my teams and I do on a daily basis.

What jumps out at me is that analytics is at the centre of the government’s strategy for processing and managing the country’s approach to Covid-19 and, most importantly, it’s a reminder that data-led analytics will need to be a driving force in what comes next.

We are all in different industries, and we come from a potentially difficult starting point because consumer behaviour has never been so disrupted in peacetime. Whether it be holidays, how we shop, buying cars, watching sport, consuming media or how we get to work, all of our regular analytic approaches in these areas will need to adapt. Our focus will be firmly on what is next.

That is where I have the confidence that, as an analytic industry, we will draw on what is best within our research sector and deliver what is needed to give recommendations that will support our ability to kick-start a recovery. However, the industry must bear in mind a few fundamental approaches.

First, we will need to be collaborative. The best of our thinking comes from when we share approaches, ideas and, importantly, the right data. We have already seen how supermarkets were able to connect more openly to find a fix for stock issues and how to navigate products to store. Nielsen has provided data to the UK government to aid analysis on purchasing patterns and the supply of essential items. Pleasingly, we have worked with other agencies to pull together our different areas of expertise to support the food and drink companies with which we work, identifying which products should be in store to aid decisions on production.

We will need to be creative to benefit from that collaborative mindset. As an industry, we are nimbler than we are sometimes given credit for, and one such example was the fast development and adoption of apps monitoring the length of queues at supermarkets, out of stocks, and more. These techniques are not necessarily new, but are using analytics from consumer-led data in a creative way to help people make better decisions. Drawing on the recommendations from this consumer-based data will be important to us all as we move through to recovery.

We will need to be adaptable in our approach. Certain analytic approaches and research techniques will be scrutinised, as they often draw on historical behaviour to make decisions. We will need to find ways to forecast and combine human thinking with the development of AI to get to the answers we are being asked. Given the variability in consumer behaviour, I expect we will see, across all parts of day-to-day life, that it will be a time when the power of such analytics comes through.

I was determined not to write about Covid-19 in this column, but the reality is it has brought analytics into our homes in such an overt way that it could not be ignored. We will find the analytics that shape the right response and then we should shout about the role analytics is playing.

We need to put this industry in the spotlight to ensure we get the investment we all need to be collaborative, creative and adaptable for when life gets back to ‘normal’.

This article was first published in the July 2020 issue of Impact.