I was lucky enough to spend some time with a number of founders, funds and business leaders last week, and behind the data discussion stood a very familiar theme: how do you keep a customer happy and keep them coming back?
Data has enabled business, big and small, to know more about us than we ever imagined possible. They know where we are, what we watch, who we like, and even seem to have a pretty good idea of what we want before we do... so why isn’t every data-led business a success?
Perhaps the truth is that customers haven’t really changed all that much at all: we remember our experience, how we were treated, and how we came away feeling. That is true whether you’re buying your weekly shopping or visiting your doctor. Being able to anticipate your market and knowing what the customer wants is part of the recipe for sure, but building a brand that people trust and recognise above the white noise? That’s probably never been harder.
It has never been easier to launch a new brand. It may be getting harder to build a world-beating one An average of 19,000 new non-food products entered the American market annually in the ten years to 2015, up from 11,000 a year in the previous decade and 3,500 in the one before that.