Data Isn't Truth

The many truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.

Here in Kansas City, meteorologists predicted a significant ice storm for this weekend. It never really materialized and social media lit up with "gee, must be nice to always be wrong and still have a job" memes.

Which brings us to today's topic: Data isn't "the" truth. Data is a snapshot of "a" truth at a moment in time. Weather forecasts attempt to predict the weather days in advance. Early last week, when there were forecasts of a significant ice storm, the data indicated this was 'a' truth. And for that moment in time, it was correct based on the known data. That data changed and evolved, so the forecast had to change and evolve.

As we become more data driven, we must accept that data evolves. It changes. What was 'true' yesterday may not (and probably will not) be true tomorrow. We, as marketing professionals, need our teams to understand this new normal. Wanting to be a data driven organization means we must become a much more agile organization.

Too many organizations have been using data wrong. We believed that once we collected it and created actionable insights, our job was done. It was"truth;" worse, we accepted it to be "forever truth." Data is fluid...because the environment it represents is fluid. Business is fluid. People are fluid. Competition is fluid. Data only represents a chapter in the story, it isn't the final story.

It used to be that marketing was about dictating to the market. Marketing defined what was cool, what was necessary. Today, marketing is more about navigation. Our job is to continually watch market conditions; make subtle (or significant) changes based upon the currents we see. We use data to create a narrative that ebbs and flows and that narrative must be capable of evolving...just as we must be capable of evolving and adapting.

As our organization wants to transform into a data-driven organization, we must help our team accept this new normal. We cannot be both data-driven and rigid in our approach. We cannot be data-driven, yet lock-in marketing plans two years in advance. Being data driven means accepting one universal (and forever) truth: everything changes.