STABILITY IN DISRUPTIVE TIMES Scott McDonald shares insights on how survey responses showcase the fact that the industry is moving in the right direction. But taking the right actions now is imperative for survival in the long run.
The survey responses featured in this report around management being supportive of insights are consistent with other information that I’ve seen from our members. In particular, because a lot of these companies relied more on research and organizations like the ARF for guidance in navigating the rapids of the pandemic and the economic gyrations around the closing down of the economy as well as the reopening of the economy. Consumer behavior has of course gone through massive shifts. There was a significant amount of scenario planning and a lot of strategy retooling on what organizations were providing, but it went much more directly to C-Suite. You saw that in a lot of a lot of companies. We had a great presentation by Unilever on just that at our forecasting event.
“Consumer behavior has of course gone through massive shifts. There was a significant amount of scenario planning and a lot of strategy retooling on what organizations were providing, but it went much more directly to C-Suite.” Do we need to be thinking about restructuring our organizations as the infrastructure of our industry evolves? Well, always. And that’s one of the interesting questions about data science because a lot of companies started out building data science teams that were centralized functions being lent to disciplines like finance, HR, product development, marketing, etc. What I think is happening is you’re starting to see domain specialist data scientists within each of these functions. That then reinforces the position of the integrator. It means this community is taking all of these signals that you’re getting from conventional surveys and mechanisms for tracking repeat purchase, brand loyalty, etc. All these signals that are coming in, someone’s got to integrate that information into something that management can make sense of.
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