Uncovering Aha! | Data-savvy Brand Strategy

Black Friday has shifted from being “the” shopping holiday of the year to “a” shopping day amidst a calendar year full of perpetual sales. How do retailers find success - and what should they measure to define that success? In this episode, Callahan’s retail strategy director Kristin Demel and chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson discuss the metrics that should matter most to retailers on the eve of 2019’s Black Friday, and how to build affinity for your product or brand in the months leading up to the holiday shopping season.

Having product on shelves is an obvious requirement for customers’ ability to purchase it. But, why drive a consumer to a store if the product’s not on shelves - and why isn’t it there? In this episode, Callahan’s retail strategy director Kristin Demel and head of data Zack Pike discuss the importance of understanding the factors behind out of stock products and how to incorporate that data into your marketing plans.

Virtual reality has become mainstream enough that it’s time for brands to think about what kinds of experiences to offer. In this episode, Callahan’s director of social and emerging media Ben Smith talks about VR’s emerging trends, what brands should really be prepared for, and how to start thinking about VR from a marketing perspective.

Customer journeys are nothing new to marketing plans. But, there are more personal factors - and context - to consider now. In this episode, Callahan’s activation strategist Joe Cox and chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson discuss the major trappings of a traditional customer journey, and identify three questions you can ask to start to evolve your approach to developing them.

What’s really behind a football fan's decision to go to a game? In this episode, Callahan’s senior business analyst James Meyerhoffer-Kubalik walks Jan-Eric through a predictive model he built that measures variables from concessions to the weather that effect a football game’s attendance by fans.

Knowing how navigate retail is critical to the success of any brand with shelf space. In this episode, Jan-Eric talks about emerging retail trends - challenges and opportunities - with Kristin Demel, Callahan’s Retail Strategy Director. She has some recommendations for your channel strategy and how to evaluate Amazon for your brand. 

It's easy to generalize performance of your retail locations when looking at data. Sometimes, the true aha insights are lurking in the details. In this episode, Zack and Jan-Eric discuss the potential power of those insights in micro sets of data, how you can separate them and uncover what they mean to the bigger picture.

Analytics are a critical component of any marketing campaign. But who should be in charge of that reporting? In this episode, Jan-Eric and Zack make a “controversial” case that your ad agency is the most qualified to take on the responsibility of marketing analytics, and detail four factors to consider to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.

Often, a company’s internal analytics functions are housed somewhere within the finance department to monitor things like cash flow and other operational data. In this episode, we make a case for establishing marketing analytics as part of that team’s function, which would then be able to inform a CMO’s decisions with more detailed sales data.

Ben Smith, Callahan's Director of Social and Emerging Media, recently attended Facebook's F8 conference for developers. In this episode, Ben shares his insight and perspective on the overall health of Facebook, its coverage in news, and what emerging trends could shape future marketing tactics on the platform.

Inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we’re taking our own marketing-specific angle to his pyramid. In this third episode, we detail Level 5: Prediction – how you can leverage the insights established within the previous layers to predict your marketing activity.

Inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we’re taking our own marketing-specific angle to his pyramid. In this second episode, we detail Level 3: Internal factors, and Level 4: External factors – and how you can establish and define both within your existing business plans.

Inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we’re taking our own marketing-specific angle to his pyramid. In this first episode, we detail Level 1: Delivery of activity, and Level 2: Efficiency and optimization – and how you can establish and define both within your existing business plans.

Done right, business analytics can allow a marketing team or a golfer to understand the problems that are worth solving. In this episode, we talk about how a research model that predicts professional golfers'  future performance can inform your own approach to marketing and help identify what really matters to maximize your ROI.

When running a marketing automation program, most systems provide adequate campaign reporting analytics. But often, these systems make it tough to discover insights that go much deeper than basic performance metrics. In this episode, we talk about what it takes to pull your data out of systems like Marketo and uncover new insights by overlaying additional data sources.

Callahan's senior business analyst used his spare time once again to construct an algorithm - this time to determine which movies have the highest chance of winning "Best Picture" at the 2019 Oscars.  In this episode, we explain the correlation between his Oscars model and how this same predictive modeling approach can uncover aha when applied to business and marketing challenges.

Recurring analytics and data reporting can help a company track overall performance of product sales over time. In this episode, we look at how to inform traditional data reports with predictive analytics, which can predict the future for a business – but they may not tell you want you want to hear.

A CMO is under pressure to make informed decisions that affect a company's short- and long-term goals and initiatives. Oftentimes, data and analytics are a great resource for a CMO - but not always. In this episode, we discuss how a CMO can use predictive analytics as a powerful tool alongside more traditional data and analytics reporting.

Callahan’s senior business analyst built his own statistical model to investigate the college football ranking system. In this episode, he explains his method, and how it could be applied to a business’ own marketing and analytics efforts.

In a previous episode, we explained the Callahan Intelligence Platform tech stack. Since then, we've made some changes both big and small. In this podcast, we talk about those updates and the benefits of implementing innovative new technology.