Wrapped: Data Fatigue and Your Brand’s Story
As we near the end of the year, many of us get excited about personal year-in-reviews that we get in return for all the personal data we willingly hand over to our various service providers. While we store Spotify’s ability to spin data into an eerily on-point Daylist covertly away in the land of the uncanny, we cherish the ingenuity of Spotify Wrapped. Spotify consistently wraps a full sensory journey around our year, filled with bold visuals, off-the-wall conceptual analyses, and our favorite music. Raw data becomes an elevated experience. Moreover, we get the real, full picture of our playlist—intimate insights into the moments each song soundtracked, making it all the more personal.
Similarly, on the B2B side of service-based industries, we get really excited about data. It solidifies the impact we make. We eagerly share factoid after factoid as soon as we receive customer insights and the latest data points, sure that they're the missing indicators of the story we're trying to tell. From a creative strategy standpoint, they make for poppy graphics that are easy to produce and digest. But are these easy-to-post stats putting the cart before the horse when evangelizing a piece of data?
Kicking off my career on a marketing team within economic development, I lived in a world where we got really excited about annual rankings. Numbers that indicate where we sit within certain FDI markets, our logistic strength, and our workforce development pipelines are just a tiny handful of glimmering pieces and parts that all contribute to a much larger, comprehensive narrative that works to influence a company's location strategy. While we wholeheartedly believe in the future of our localities, working with the full breadth of these numbers and rankings—attempting to push the best and most relevant of them to the forefront of decision-makers’ minds—it becomes easy to vacuum-seal them as individual statistics, presenting them as the hero. In doing so, we may be unknowingly neglecting the brand storytelling that fully and eloquently composes a 360° view, missing the real story that lives at the forefront of our minds and inspires our work. We also miss out on the opportunity to connect our targets with relevant information about what we do in a memorable way. We forget that facts are easy to forget, but the narratives and stories we wrap these facts in to illuminate the value we bring persist. It’s as though Spotify were to present you with a Daylist that neglects your daily preferences or a Wrapped that lacks your life.
We must remember that everyone is competing for the same indicators of excellence within a respective space. If you're number three in a ranking, there are definitely two others saying that they're number one and two, with number four chomping at your heels. Or, if you’re looking at the coverage or efficiency of your service, you may have just surpassed an industry benchmark that your top competitor has exceeded for years.
Can your story make number three feel like number one by the value you drive through your brand? Each brand grapples with different landscapes, and those landscapes may look different for each target. When considering how to bring data into your brand story, consider the following:
Brand Value and Narrative
Are you bolstering the fact for the sake of the fact, or tactically weaving it into the fabric of your brand's story?
How does that data connect to your overall brand’s value proposition?
What existing pillars of your brand can be used as a foundation to support the data?
When you pull back from the data at hand, what do these numbers actually reveal about the effectiveness of the big picture of your product's key differentiators and your company’s values—what you do, how you do it, and why you do it—ultimately contributing to the value those assets collectively enact for your customers? What experience does this build for your brand?
Client Journey
What pain points does the data suggest your offering alleviates for your targets?
What is their big picture, and how can you use these analytics to connect your brand’s story and experience to their areas of stress?
Tactical Aspects
What is the lifespan of this data point?
How deeply can you reasonably rely on it before it requires an update?
Is the outlook of the data sustainable?
Can you trust that the rank will be held or improved over time?
When you look at all these factors, where does your available data fall in the line of priority for your brand and your audiences? What is the true value of the data to your story and your target groups?
Within these questions, a meaningful, informed deployment of data can be crafted, wrapped into your marketing tactics and strategy, supported by targeted creative strategy—all sharpened by your brand value proposition and audience need.
