High-Growth Firms Make Better Strategic Use of Data: Survey


Key findings of the main report:

Data has proved most valuable so far for marketing leaders. From better ways to segment the customer base, to rethinking the ideal product mix in a retail store, marketing leaders are finding wide-ranging uses for their data to help improve how they market their company’s wares. Already, 50 percent of chief marketing officers say they have tried and found a clear, positive difference in using data to improve their understanding of customers, as just one of a range of successful applications. This is a markedly higher proportion than their C-suite peers.

The financial services sector, technology companies, and professional services firms are most prepared for the data age. Three sectors stand out as being most prepared for the data age: the financial services sector (where 22 percent have a well-defined data management strategy in place); the technology industry (30 percent); and the professional services sector (40 percent). By contrast, such data management strategies are least often found amongst manufacturers (16 percent) and retailers (13 percent).

Businesses are stockpiling an ever-growing range of data and expect data gathering to continue to expand rapidly. Whether social media sentiment, machine-generated data via sensors, staff emails, market data or otherwise, firms of all shapes and sizes are now collecting more information than ever before. At least seven in ten companies collect syndicated third-party data, such as weather information (72 percent), or government data (70 percent), while many gather anything from internal staff data (66 percent) to some kind of location-based information (41 percent), among many other types. Two-thirds of business leaders say the range and types of data have expanded in the past two years, while about three-quarters expect this data stockpiling to expand yet further in the coming two years.

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