Uncovering Aha! | Data-savvy Brand Strategy

Now’s the time to assess your retail strategy, review your playbook, and think about your KPIs. Retailers and brands have permission from their customers right now to implement unprecedented levels of change. This is the opportunity to rethink and reinvent what the future looks like for retail, whatever brand or business you're part of, and incorporate those ideas into your goals for 2021. In our final podcast of the 2020 Retail Wrap-Up Series, Joe Cox, Director of Communication Strategy, talks with Kristin Demel, Retail Strategy Director, about the biggest "aha" moments uncovered in the past holiday retail episodes, the three key takeaways for retail in 2020 and how retailers and brands can be intentional, versus reactionary, in 2021.

Combine the traditional scramble for loyalty during and proceeding the holiday season with the fact that 75% of shoppers have tried a new product this year, and it makes for an exceptionally top of mind topic for C-suite executives and marketers. Kristin Demel, retail strategy director talks with Joe Cox, director of communication strategy, about how brands can address shifting loyalties, why it's different for everyone based on the specific needs and values of your consumer, and which brands were ready for this loyalty shift and the brands that weren't.

Retailers and brands must consider Black Friday ethics in the midst of the 2020 holiday shopping season. Safety is obviously top of mind, as is the financial situation many shoppers are in, due to the pandemic, which creates many challenges and ethical issues to address. In this episode, Kristin Demel, Retail Strategy Director at Callahan, talks with Joe Cox, Director of Communication Strategy, about the top three ethical considerations for retailers and brands this season.

In this third episode of a multi-part holiday retail series, Joe Cox, Director, Communication Strategy at Callahan talks to Kristin Demel, Retail Strategy Director, on the five shopper modes and how retailers and brands must evolve their online, in-store and digital experiences to meet consumer expectations and shift from reactionary tactics to intentional action.

In the second podcast of this multi-part holiday retail series, Kristin Demel, Retail Strategy Director at Callahan talks with Mark Tribble, VP of Brand Management on why the phrase omni-channel is outdated as part of a discussion on the top five holiday retail tactics that are likely to see drastic changes this year.

The 2020 retail holiday season will be one unlike any others, with new challenges and major shifts for most retailers. This is the first podcast of a multi-part holiday retail series designed to discuss upcoming challenges and opportunities this holiday season with the goal to help brands and retailers make the shift from reactionary to intentional. 

Teams are spending a lot of time compiling massive amounts of data, to prepare reports for the next status meeting only to run out of bandwidth to analyze and recommend optimizations…only to have taken too long to inform the next media cycle. Jan-Eric Anderson, president at Callahan, and Zack Pike, head of data at Callahan, explains three ways your team can stop wasting time in media reporting by utilizing front-end data analysis, leveraging technology and getting comfortable trusting the algorithms.

Front-end analytics means using the data you have, to drive decisions when planning. It's about predicting the areas of marketing with the highest potential. You have access to the data, but how do you make it actionable? Jan-Eric Anderson, president at Callahan, and Zack Pike, head of data at Callahan, explain three important components a marketer must have to make data actionable, and discuss the benefits to implementing front-end analytics.

Maximizing the productivity of your marketing analytics team is always about the data, and the time it takes to analyze large sets of data to uncover key insights. In this episode, Callahan’s president Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike talk about what technology they use, and how to staff an analytics team with the right roles to the most out of a team of analysts.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are phrases that get used frequently and oftentimes interchangeably. However, the two are quite different in their abilities to inform your data and marketing plans. In this episode, Callahan’s chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike talk about what the two technologies can do and how to leverage them within a your proprietary data.

Guest experience - and customer feedback about their experiences, is a critical component to sales performance in a store.  In this episode, Callahan’s chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike talk about how to integrate customer experience feedback into and alongside more numerical data, and what sources of customer feedback you can start with.

Incorporating free data into your marketing dashboard can be a good way to add additional insights. In this episode, Callahan’s chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike discuss the pros, cons and challenges of utilizing third-party data, how you can get started, and what to watch out for.

What happens in a post-pandemic world? How have consumer behaviors shifted, how do we continue to meet their needs and how do these changes affect our company as a whole?  In this episode, Callahan’s activation strategist, Joe Cox, and chief strategy officer, Jan-Eric Anderson, discuss what brands should be considering and why the time is now to make big changes.

Navigating your marketing plan and brand response during this COVID-19-generated pandemic is no easy feat to say the least. In this episode, Callahan’s chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike discuss how to use data from health organizations and make informed business decisions about how best to navigate the coronavirus’ effect on commerce and community.

Coronavirus has reshaped a lot of consumer behaviors in a short amount of time. In this episode, Callahan’s activation strategist Joe Cox and chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson discuss what consumers are expecting from companies, and what the differences and similarities are between a company response and a brand response.

As companies around the world make coronavirus preparations, they are making decisions that affect their business, their employees and their marketing strategy. Decisions that may change as the situation evolves. Jan-Eric Anderson, chief strategy officer at Callahan, offers some perspective and explains why you should not wait to take action within your company.

The only constant is change - so how do you navigate the change inside your business as C-Suite leadership and other key personnel leave an organization? In this episode, Callahan’s retail strategy director Kristin Demel and chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson discuss data-driven tactics you can use to navigate this kind of transition and make sure your business is set up for success with new leadership and employees.

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 2020 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.

Callahan’s senior business analyst built his own statistical model to investigate the college football ranking system. In this episode, he explains his method, how it could be applied to a business’ own marketing and analytics efforts, and whether or not the selection committee let the “best” four teams in this year.

It would be tough to find a company that would say data isn’t important. But, what is the expectation of data as a marketing function or resource: does it drive, or inspire your decisions and planning? In this episode, Callahan’s chief strategy officer Jan-Eric Anderson and head of data Zack Pike discuss how organizations end up having a tendency for one or the other, and how you can position your leadership to focus more on being inspired by the opportunities your data uncovers.