Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

I’m reading Jim Collin’s Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t.

I was just reading it in the gym, while riding the bike, and I hit a paragraph that I liked enough to grab my pen (what kind of geek takes a pen on the exercise bike?) and highlighted it for a blog posting.

This paragraph is in the first chapter, where he’s discussing his methodology for the research that went into the findings in the book. The relevance to this blog is in his approach to data analysis and the distillation of actionable knowledge from the analysis.

I want to quote it directly:

“I’ve tried to come up with a simple way to convey what was required to go from all the data, analyses, debates…to the final findings in this book. The best answer I can give is that is was an iterative process of looping back and forth, developing ideas and testing them against data, revising the ideas, building a framework, seeing it break under the weight of evidence, and rebuilding it yet again. That process was repeated over and over, until everything hung together in a coherent framework of concepts. We all have a strength or two in life, and I suppose mine is the ability to take a lump of unorganized information, see patterns, and extract order from the mess — to go from chaos to concept.”

From chaos to concept. Yes.

I can identify with his process, and with what he describes as his strength. I can get so immersed in the data that I reach a sort of “River Runs Through It” zen fly fishing, connection-with-your-surroundings level. There are times when I see patterns and glitches in the Matrix, feel tremors in the Force, and…ok, I’m out of movie metaphors.

But what I really love in this description is something else I think about in my work: a process built on humility. Sure, it helps to have smarts, and skills, and subject area expertise. And creativity, and energy, and intelluctual curiosity. And a great team that possesses all these things. But all this will only get you so far.

By keenly applying humility to the process, you recognize that your ideas could be wrong. In fact, you realize that if you really do have all those things I mentioned, you’re very like to be wrong very frequently.  

A motto/credo that I’ve used in hiring: at our company, if you’re not wrong frequently, you’re not trying hard enough.

And to return to the “process built on humility,” it’s not just an attitude: its an approach. Jim Collins was talking about business research. For me—for the Creatalytics approach—I’m talking about building technology, data analytics, and discipline to drive marketing in a way that assumes mistakes will be made, and allows you to iterate very very quickly, and forces your learning to push every aspect of marketing to higher levels of effectiveness.

And so, in the case of Creatalytics, we don’t try to go from “chaos to concept.” Concept is fine when you’re researching a book: but if you’re spending tens of thousand of dollars a day to drive traffic to your sites, you need results. Conversions. Maximized Ticket Value. Lifetime Value. Referrals. Customer Satisfaction.  Etc.

And Creatalytics is an ongoing cycle. By design, it goes from chaos to concept to implementation to testing to analysis and then, quite purposefully, back to chaos for another run at it. Again and again.

And all with great humility. We’re smart because we admit we’re not so smart. We build a system, with a simple set of rules, that leverages our smarts to give us answers and actions.

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Data Driven Marketing by Matthew Burgess