If You Don’t Believe Us, Just ask McKinsey! The Case for Fresh Data

Jeff McDonald, CEO Americas

One of the things I love about business today is the wealth of information we have at our disposal. The availability of credible research is no longer solely in the hands of the big players. If you’re willing to look for it, anyone can have access to relevant, useful, and usable data.

The only problem is fresh data can age fast.

For example, I subscribe to McKinsey Quarterly. I find their investigations into the complex circumstances impacting brands through the pandemic and resulting economic downturn incredibly insightful.

A recent paper in the Marketing and Sales Practice was particularly interesting: “The Great Consumer Shift: Ten charts that show how US shopping behavior is changing”.

The report contains in-depth analysis and hypotheses across such topics as online shopper behavior, customer loyalty, eating at restaurants, and purchase data across multiple categories of FMCG products. There’s also plenty of conjecture regarding the behaviors that consumers SAY they intend to continue once the pandemic is over.

Really useful stuff for all brands and retailers right now. However, some of the data in this report, dated 4 August, may already be starting to age. And this is only logical –  the research reflects the opinions and behaviors pertinent to the time of publication.

I’m not for one second suggesting this report is old news. Far from it – it’s an important read, even if you aren’t a McKinsey client! And I’m sure that future in-depth examinations into these topics will certainly be just as illuminating and thought provoking. But, like most trackers commissioned by brands, reports are likely to be more retrospective than predictive. So, unless you catch the data while it’s fresh, it’s harder to activate against.

There’s a quote in the report that I feel will always remain relevant. It’s in relation to the tendency of consumers to switch brands based on availability, convenience and value:

“For marketers, this highlights the need to quickly become aware of when shoppers are migrating brands or retailers and then to manage the logistics to ensure product and service availability”. 

McKinsey is drawing attention to the fact that real-time intelligence is fast becoming the table stakes for agile, split-second decision making throughout brand organizations. And fortunately, just as credible research is now available to all organizations regardless of size, so is real-time intelligence.  At Delineate, we believe it’s an essential component of brand health management and business decision support. 

This is the Northstar that underpins our product development and services strategy. It’s nice to know McKinsey agrees!