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Social Technologies and the Digital Marketing Mix

May 13, 2013 Leave a Comment

Social media has and will continue to explode, and I am certain that 2013 will be the year of conversations. In my previous blog, we explored the changing face of the marketing mix and transforming marketing principles around it. In this blog, we will be defining the digital marketing mix and explore a few technologies which can help us in understanding related digital data points. There are several data points which are equally important for the success of your digital marketing planning and strategies.

The following write up will focus on the integration of social technologies into our digital marketing mix. The internet and mobile technologies have given individuals the opportunity to create and distribute content, share their likes and dislikes, self-organise and participate in millions of conversations every day. As a result, they can create new types of content – while talking to brands or companies, expressing grievances and complaints, send their suggestions, to protest and sometimes bring down a government – Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. These technologies and the spurt of data accessibility through mobile devices will fundamentally change the marketing power structures.

Primarily, social technologies are made of various types of digital tools notably blogs, micro-blogging, video sharing, photo sharing, podcasting, mapping, social networking, wiki and several other tools. These digital tools are seamlessly integrated to our day to day application of digital marketing practices.

Content is being produced by users of social technologies and distributed one to many. Marketers are creating brand and marketing led content and distributing it through several free and easy technologies which can reach millions of consumers globally. We all are given the power to create content, we create them, publish them and then distribute these multimedia contents freely and easily. However, not everybody is a creator, according to the 1% internet rule, 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators. So far content is being created by thought leaders

Conversations are an outcome of what social technologies have enabled us to have two-way conversations between users. Be it brands talking to consumers, employees talking to organisations, or simply between two individuals. These conversations are purpose driven, a shared purpose where the exchange of thoughts and ideas happen. Often, they convolute into a trend, fashion or fad or some socio-geo-political event. For example, how the recent #Boston bombing unfolded on multiple social networking sites or some natural disasters like the recent earthquake in China or #Sandy in USA – conversations possess viral tendencies. Social technologies have helped us in a great way to share our conversations with many others who are seeking or following the same purpose.

Collaborations are another example where social technologies have emerged as blessings for co-creation and collective action. This includes creating wikis, forums and online survey platforms like Lime Survey. Several multinationals are riding the wave of collaborative success like Coca-Cola’s co-creation community with eYeka; another great example is BMW’s minisite to co-create designs and other ‘Car’ ideas.

Community is an outcome of social technology phenomenon discussed above. The digital marketing mix is overwhelmed by the communities and the advancement that social technologies have imparted to us. These online communities are formed due to a shared purpose: to engage each other again and again. In research we create online communities to share content, build conversations and co-create ideas for a new product or service. A good example of this is Revelation, a platform that facilitates online qualitative discussions. The challenge for marketers is to identify, design, build, and then manage an online community.

Another arena where social technologies have come to the fore as cutting edge tools is where these conversations are aggregated. Algorithms can be developed and run to generate insights that can provide immense value. In my next blog I will be discussing about different social media tools which are helpful in several different ways.

Vibhor Pandey is an Account Director with Metrix Consulting, and a massive fan of Carlos Santana.

Digital Analytics – The Evolution of Marketing

May 1, 2013 1 Comment

Digital Analytics – The Evolution of Marketing

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. – Alvin Toffler

In recent years, the digitisation of almost everything around us has triggered several new possibilities for users of marketing and especially for those in the field of applied marketing. The initial step in understanding this digital world is to learn about the digital data sources, which is not only limited to the web but also social media, email marketing, online advertising, mobile strategy, videos, and search engines.

Allow me to take you through the digitisation and substantial shift in the core marketing principles and their applications.

The traditional 4Ps of marketing, namely: Product, Price, Place and Promotion, were early marketing principles. In the past, business entities have analysed their marketing positions based on these 4Ps, which in later years, considering the ever changing consumer centric market, have been replaced by the 4Cs. It was the shift from a manufacturer’s market to a consumer’s market. I would call it the Pre-Digital Era i.e. the time before Web 2.0.

Pre-Digital Era

The internet came along and the rules of the game started to change quite significantly. If consumers are now more aware, then marketers have now become more vulnerable. It was an opportunity for all of us to connect, reconnect, and communicate in an open and more literate environment, and all of this was possible due to the avenues of digitisation of applied marketing, as a result of the emergence of the technology. Today, marketers need to change the mind set of “Command-and-Control” to “Converse-and-Manage”.

The Digital Era

In today’s age of conversations, where brands and people are working towards a shared purpose, the process of co-creation is becoming more prevalent. Brands and consumers no longer exist in a vacuum, they need to converse and co-create things for each other. This means marketers need to adopt ways of engaging their consumers and the community, they need to listen and nurture the ongoing dialogue – they should embrace the co-creation.

Having a physical Place (Store, Distribution centre and other physical assets) at a convenient location is not enough, it needs to be digitised as well. Brand content needs to be aggregated on Tumblr, Blogs, Apps and company websites. These brand contents (created for shared purposes) need to be distributed through social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Digital connectedness has empowered today’s consumer to go beyond the printed retail price. They have started comparing the Prices even before they physically touch/feel the product. Consumers read into competition pricing information. They speculate. They weigh one brand against another, and only then will they enter into a trade with brands.

Promotions and communications are no longer single screen (TV / mass media) driven; reach and frequencies aren’t enough for your promotional strategies. It’s time to listen and learn from these conversations and engagements. It is an era of “earned media”, where consumers spread conversations about product performance and values.

Almost half of the active internet universe has already joined some kind of brand community; whether it is a Facebook page or following their favourite brands on Twitter or LinkedIn. Digital media has started enabling a large and active community to create content and share it with those of shared purpose. This means the web is changing. It has become a two-way, active participation from consumers and marketers.

These conversations need to be measured, monitored and managed. The current challenge is to identify the kind of relationship a consumer wants, it is to understand why and how social media is being used. Is it for everyone? Or only some selected businesses?

In my next blog post I will be talking about social technologies, and the tools that are easily accessible to monitor your social media presence.

Vibhor Pandey is an Account Director at Metrix Consulting. He’s also a keen cyclist.

Thinking ‘Big’? Start ‘Small’ First

April 17, 2013 1 Comment

“Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.” – Nate Silver, author of “The Signal and the Noise”.

It seems everywhere you go these days you can’t avoid hearing people talking about Big Data, and it does seem to have very much a utopian flavour to it. After all I think everyone’s job would be a lot easier if they had the right real-time information to inform their decision making at any point in time. But does the value proposition truly stack up for every business? And are there simpler options for your business with more immediate payoffs?

Defining Big Data

Coming up with a clear definition for what Big Data truly means is an interesting exercise in itself, much like Data Mining was a decade or so ago, it seems to be a ‘catch all’ phrase used by many to describe a particular activity, in this instance drawing meaningful information from a typically large data file. But how large is BIG? I think this is best assessed by whether you can use conventional data warehousing approaches to consolidate and manage the data. If you can, it’s more than likely what I like to call a ‘Small Data’ situation.

Clarity around what you are looking to do with Big Data

In a recent poll by Infochimps amongst Big Data professionals, they admitted that 55% of Big Data projects were not completed. So what was the #1 cause for such a high fail rate? The project being inaccurately scoped at the early stages, which all up accounted for 32% of Big Data projects that were started. So why is there a high failure rate?

The common misconception people have is that all Big Data problems can essentially be managed and executed in the same manner. In essence, this is only true if the objectives consistently overlap. The reality is that the goals that each business will be looking to achieve from their Big Data exercises will very rarely converge, so much greater thought needs to be taken in diagnosing and detecting what the business is looking to achieve. This not only shapes the problem in a more concise manner, allowing a greater concentration of effort, but also the approach you will need to take to get there. Without reinventing the wheel, there is a great blog post on the SAS website that talks about this very point.

The other BIGs that come with Big Data

For many companies, the romantic notion of wedding themselves to Big Data heads them quickly to the divorce courts once they see the accompanying ‘extra baggage’ that come along with the marriage. These often come in the form of:

BIG infrastructure requirements to house the data.
BIG cleaning, managing and monitoring costs associated in using the data.
BIG staffing costs to acquire skilled professionals to do anything with the data.
BIG development costs to disseminate the data to the appropriate stakeholders.

For companies looking to embrace Big Data without the BIG picture clearly in mind on how they will leverage this information, they will inevitably see it as a BIG money pit and a BIG waste of time and resource.

Big Data can also come with Big Noise

In the Infochimps poll referenced above, the same professionals were asked, “If they could make sure their boss understood one thing about Big Data that they don’t understand right now, what would it be?” The following was given as a response, “Noise reduction is key. Getting lots of data also means throwing out lots of data, inevitably”. This is right on the money. Just because you have more of something it doesn’t automatically make it more valuable or more meaningful. In the case of Big Data, it actually means you have more chance of being distracted away from the big picture.

Is Big Data right for you?

One of the sayings I often use is “why look for a needle in a haystack when you can look for one in a needle store”. The risks that companies run with Big Data is expending a lot of time, effort and resources looking in the haystack for that needle, and then, after failing to find that needle, look to work some of the hay into a sharp object to get the job done. There’s obviously a huge business risk here, you can easily mistake an inferior offering as an opportunity for the broader business, when in essence all you really found was the ‘best fit’ with what was available.

My personal feeling is that you shouldn’t look to embrace Big Data until you feel you’ve tapped out all the ‘Small Data’ in your business first. Having gone through this process first, you’ll be better disciplined in dealing with how to fulfil the 6D’s that define the nuggets of gold, worthy of incorporating into the business. This also allows the business to familiarise itself with utilising internal information to progress (and let’s face it, this is a change management process) and ensures that any endeavours in this space will be well thought out and have a greater chance of success in the future.

In itself, Big Data is not a revolution, it is an evolution of ‘Small Data’ principles. So start ‘Small’, get those runs on the board, exhaust all those avenues, and then look to aim ‘Big’.

Glenn Jamieson is the Head of Data Integration and Efficiency at Metrix. He’s also our in-house AFL encyclopedia.

The 6 D’s of Data Mining

April 11, 2013 1 Comment

From my personal experiences over the years, there are several key phases that any data mining project goes through – I often refer to these as the 6Ds of Data Mining. Here is a quick overview of each of these phases:

Define – it is at this point that you are looking to gain an appreciable understanding of what is required. Essentially what the objectives are, how success is going to be measured and what the expected end outputs will be.

Develop – At this point, the objectives need to be fleshed out into a series of questions that you will be using the data to answer. The development phase will also determine the critical points in the process that have dependencies on other stages being met beforehand.

Diagnose – After the development stage, you need to determine the data that will be required to answer the questions that have been posed above. This encompasses all components of the data preparation stage (sourcing data, identifying key components, checks on the data for cleanliness/consistency and consolidating the data into the appropriate data views).

Discover – the fun part, doing the analysis required to answer the questions posed above. In this stage, it is not uncommon to revisit the three previous stages in order to either tighten up a previous specification or look to source data from alternate locations to provide greater context.

Decipher – pulling together the findings for all the key discovery points and seeing if they are relevant to incorporate back into the business.

Disseminate/Deploy – At this stage, the results of the exercise are shared with the broader working group. In addition to this, it is also the point in time where any additional reporting requirements for the future are built to ensure that the useability of the knowledge can be leveraged in the future.

Look out for next week, where I’ll discuss my personal thoughts on Big Data.

Glenn Jamieson is the Head of Data Integration and Efficiency at Metrix. He is also the first one onboard for any karaoke outing.

The Future is Now

March 22, 2013 Leave a Comment

Often we read or hear things about the future, but then choose to put the information to one side and fail to realise when this future actually starts to happen around us. Take climate change for example. We’ve been hearing scientific forecasts for over a decade predicting higher temperatures and more volatile weather patterns. Well, if that doesn’t describe our most recent summer in Australia, I don’t know what does. Experts are now describing our weather as ‘climate on steroids’ due to the impacts of global warming.

The same is true in market research. With the rapid explosion of data sources and information channels there are many predictions about what market research needs to look like in the future. In fact, most of these trends are here already, though many people are not yet responding to the changes.

Recently, Greenbook (www.greenbookblog.org) shared the outcomes of a webinar discussing Predictions for the Market Research Industry. Three points raised by a group of industry leaders in the USA demonstrate ‘predictions’ that marketers can all be responding to now.

1. Data visualisation will completely change the way market insights communicates

“In the next 10 years data visualization will completely change the way the market insights industry communicates results back to the clients – because that’s what our clients will demand from us. Our research shows that visuals help elevate the market insights department because they are much easier to distribute into organization. Stakeholders don’t read lengthy research reports. Even more important, as a result of all technology developments (tablets, YouTube, twitter, what’s app just to name a few) all of us are getting used to bite-sized information. That means that research output not only should look good, but also be very easy to consume.”

This sounds like many organisations and executives today, and we’re already seeing a fantastic response to reports delivered in the form of an Infographic or Live Web Portal.

2. The focus in the future will be integrating all the existing data

“Creating data is becoming more and more of a commodity. In fact, it is rare that we say there is not enough data. The focus has to be on methods of understanding all this data, and identifying the marketing opportunities that are revealed through the methods.”

Clients are already integrating data themselves from multiple sources, often through their internal Insights Departments. The real challenge is creating simple and effective systems to integrate, analyse and share the relevant information with the right people, at the right time. Much of the new product development we’re seeing is in this area of data integration and sharing, and it’s delivering excellent results.

This was also highlighted in the webinar discussion:

“For market insights professionals, big data will involve integrating a variety of different data sources — social media, web, survey, and transactional data — and analyzing them in real time while the sources and structures of the data are changing. This is impossible without investing in some type of business intelligence software and collaborating with other departments.”

3. Primary data collection via surveys will increasingly be done on mobile devices.

“For some online surveys in the US about a fifth of respondents open up the invite on their mobile device. This creates a very specific non-response bias. Having a mobile strategy for these respondents, either re-routing or offering them an optimized mobile survey is something everyone should consider.”

At present, few online surveys are set up to be mobile compatible. However, the technology exists and the penetration and use of smartphones and tablets in our society means that mobiles are now the number 1 online device for many people. The organisations that include this channel in their primary research activities will reap the benefits of better sampling and faster response rates.

Julie Beeck is an Executive Director at Metrix, and arguably the worlds number one fan of the mini-series: Zen.

Advertising Evaluation – The Director’s Cut

March 15, 2013 Leave a Comment

Our Managing Director, Marquis Pohla, was a guest columnist in the West’s ‘Out to Market’ column on Monday 11 March 2013.

As a follower of our blog we are pleased to provide you with the uncut version of his column:

During 2012, businesses invested approximately $1 billion in media to advertise their brand, product or service to Western Australians. All of these businesses were trying to achieve an outcome that had some direct linkage to their business performance. Things such as growing brand awareness, building a more positive image, generating more enquiries, or simply driving sales. In today’s economy, most organisations are facing increasing costs, increasing competition and tightening margins. Therefore, there is a greater requirement to be accountable for every dollar spent on advertising and to demonstrate its effectiveness. While there is no hard or fast rule when it comes to evaluating advertising, many experts suggest 5% to 10% of an advertising budget should be dedicated to evaluation.

However, it is common for businesses to have no fixed framework for evaluating their advertising effectiveness. These businesses have no formal way of determining whether their advertising delivered the outcomes they were seeking, and are at major risk of wasting many of their precious dollars (and as the saying goes, not knowing which dollars are being wasted). Advertising evaluation can identify many issues, such as channels failing to reach the desired consumers, executions that do not cut through the clutter, advertising messages that are misappropriated to the wrong brand, or ‘wear out’ from using a creative execution for too long. All of these things impact on the effectiveness of your advertising dollar. As we know, what get’s measured gets managed, and these factors can all be managed with an effective evaluation framework in place.

So how can businesses build an evaluation framework? It starts with thinking about what you are trying to achieve from a specific advertising campaign, and then identifying the right metrics that align with your goals. Internal business metrics are a good starting point, as the data is immediately at hand. Often metrics such as sales volumes, channel enquiries (e.g. telephone, online) and website visitation are key variables that advertising aims to influence, and if so, trends in these measures should be compared to advertising activity. Evaluation can be taken a step further by collecting information directly from the target audience. This could be as simple as asking new customers how they found out about your business, or conducting consumer research to measure things such as brand awareness, brand perceptions, advertising recognition, brand linkage and message takeout.

Combining consumer information with internal metrics provides a holistic view of performance and a detailed diagnosis of the aspects of the advertising that worked and those that didn’t. This enables businesses to make more informed decisions regarding their advertising investment and improve their ROI. Something all businesses should be striving for.

What’s to be Gained from Gamification?

November 19, 2012 Leave a Comment

What’s to be Gained from Gamification?

Gamification has become a hot topic among marketing minds in the last year or two. As this field develops, there is still uncertainty about the future role of gamification in a brand’s marketing mix. So, is gamification over-excited hype or a valuable new tool?

Well, it depends…

For those uninitiated, let’s explore what gamification actually is. It’s all too easy to think of gamification as turning your brand into some kind of video game, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Games include not just the video variety, but sports, card games, gambling, and others. Gamification is about borrowing ideas from how these games are designed, and using those ideas to drive the behaviours you want to see. It comes from a desire to understand what creates the strong commitment that game-players have to their chosen game, and to recreate that type of commitment in a brand context.

Game developers use a range of tactics to encourage players to spend more time on the activity. One simple example of this is a ‘leaderboard’, posting the best scores of various individuals. This leads to players spending more time accumulating more points, to increase their ranking. Other tactics include accomplishments with set tasks, or competing directly against other participants. The ultimate in game design involves not only extending the time spent, but also enhancing the enjoyment of that time and activity. Add to that the involvement of others, and you have a recipe for commitment.

But what’s the success measure that distinguishes an effective gamification strategy from an expensive flop?

The answer is: Engagement.

By giving consumers something to strive for, you can engage them, build their loyalty, and create advocates for your brand. Loyalty programs have been based on similar principles for years, but gamification is something more. This is something active. There is considerable evidence that basic loyalty programs don’t create genuine engagement. Just ask the people with a wallet full of ‘loyalty’ cards. In contrast, gamification can drive people to more proactive, frequent participation in what the brand provides, AND encourage others to do the same.

In the early days of Facebook, how many people were invited to join Facebook because their friends wanted a higher friend count? How many more shoes and devices did Nike sell so that runners could push themselves and others using ‘Nike Plus’? How many network-hungry professionals completed their profiles just to see the ‘100% complete’ bar on Linkedin and unlock the ‘next level’ of profile visibility? While gamification is experienced mostly through digital platforms, it is strongly linked to genuine, real-world activity.

The cost to set up a gamification strategy varies: designing a beautiful, graphic-heavy application across all digital platforms will have considerable development costs but can be designed to run for some time, whereas a simple posting competition on a company Facebook page costs next to nothing.

We all like to achieve. To win. And we like others to see that we’re doing it. To most of us, it doesn’t matter how small the win is. If you can link your organisation’s brand to the positive feelings of success people feel through even the simplest of accomplishments, you start to build an addiction to your brand.

Which sounds good, but as always, it’s not that easy. That genuine link between your brand and the positive feelings created by the ‘game’ is much harder to establish than it sounds, and can be short-lived. Many people are easily distracted by another experience that also makes them feel good. They’re after the points, the badges, the unlocked achievements all in themselves, and often they don’t even see the brand. If the overall strategy is not well planned, what you achieve is one single incident of gamification is the same as other mediums could get you with a lot less trouble. In this case, gamification can lead to a lot of resources being spent for a short series of one-off, low value consumer experiences.

Before embarking on a gamification approach you need to consider if your brand lends itself easily to these kinds of engagement mechanics. If your brand has to force its use of gamification, the attempt probably isn’t going to resonate well with your customers.

If you believe you have a prime opportunity to apply gamification to your offering, here are a few short Do’s and Don’ts to consider:

Do: Make it challenging – Make the ‘players’ work for it. If something’s too easy, the win doesn’t feel as good. If it’s too easy to do, the engagement you’re looking for is going to be short-lived. In a coffee shop example, anyone can buy a cup of coffee at the same place five days in a row, but have they tried all the varieties of coffee available?

Don’t: Make it too difficult. You want to stand out, but don’t stand out for being unreasonable (e.g. ‘Make 10,000 posts on our forum in 3 days to use coloured letters in your username’).

Do: Create value. The sense of achievement needs to be felt. It doesn’t have to be a real-world reward (e.g. free stuff), but it has to represent value. It’s this value that helps tie positive feelings back to your brand.

Don’t: Be excessive with rewards. If everyone has 20 trophies for doing very little, no one feels special. If no one feels special, they’re less likely to develop a connection with what they’re doing.

Do: Develop content around the things your target market finds ‘fun’. It’s the fun that creates the long term engagement.

Don’t: Go in blind. Get to know your consumers, rather than assume you know what they want. Remember, it’s also about how they want it.

There’s a fair bit more to it than that, but if you get it right, you could see stronger commitment to your brand than ever before.

Metrix gamification journey – Level 1: Complete!

Matt Collins is a Business Analyst at Metrix Consulting, and an avid Birmingham City FC fan.

A 10-Year Growth History of WA’s Driving Sectors

October 3, 2012 Leave a Comment

In light of recent uncertainty surrounding the resources sector, cancelled mining projects, and the economy in general, we took a look at the recent history of WA’s top five industries using an infographic.

Mining, as to be expected, stands out far and beyond any other industry division in its contribution to WA’s Gross State Product. Its growth in this area since 2004 is unparalleled by any other industry.

What is interesting to look at is which industries appear to be pulled upwards over the same periods as the mining sector. Of all the non-mining industries, Construction has shown the most growth over the same period, reflecting the need for development of infrastructure on major projects and the growing need for a variety of facilities, both on and off site.

Manufacturing is the only sector to show any decline in the 2006 to 2011 period. As we have all observed in the media, the strength of the Australian dollar, wage rises and rising input costs have all played significant roles.

The Professional, Scientific, Technical Services industry, as well as the Transport, Postal, and Warehousing industry are characterised by a slow, and steadier, rate of growth. This consistency, over a period of relative volatility in other industry sectors, shows a certain resilience to market pressures. While there is surely an impact of the mining and construction sectors on these industries, it is not apparent that it has become an essential one.

So, what does the future hold for WA? Has the recent uncertainty in the resources sector changed the way we think about the strength of our economy?

Matt Collins is a Business Analyst at Metrix Consulting, and a proud Springboks supporter.

What I learned from ‘Moneyball’

March 27, 2012 Leave a Comment

Outside of analytics, one of the other things I enjoy is watching sports, so it’s always interesting when both worlds collide, to see how the sporting industry views and utilises analytics in what they do. Over the past few years my interest in baseball has grown significantly mainly for this reason, as they appear to be the most sophisticated users of analysis data. (It’s also helped by the fact that every interaction within the game itself is an individual one, but that’s another discussion).

For some context, US baseball currently operates without a salary cap, and each franchise has affiliated minor league teams, so they are able to develop talent from within their own ranks. In theory, it should operate a lot like professional soccer in Europe: the teams with the deepest pockets should inevitably come out on top. But it rarely works out that way for a number of reasons. As a matter of fact, the 2011 World Series was contested by teams in the middle third of current payroll, and Tampa Bay, with a $42 million payroll managed to beat Boston for a playoff spot on the last day of the season (Boston’s payroll was $161.4 million).

With this in mind, I’d been meaning to get around to reading the copy of “Moneyball” I bought when I last travelled to the United States, as it is essentially this whole premise in action. I was so engrossed in the story that I ended up reading the book without stopping. I enjoyed the movie, but you really need to pick up a copy of the book to truly understand the strategy and use of analytics in driving it forward. To give some background, the book focuses around Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, a franchise which it is fair to say is one of the ‘have not’s’ in the MLB. With this in mind, he realises that he can’t get into bidding wars for players against other franchises as it is a battle he will never win, so he realises that he needs to take a different tack when it comes to building a successful team. The basis of his strategy is determining what really plays a role in determining overall success (ie – winning a baseball game), then seeing if there are ways to acquire these key components ‘on the cheap’. In essence, we’re talking about an optimisation problem here: how can I get the maximum number of wins given my current budgetary restrictions?

Of course, there wouldn’t be a story without there being some element of success in the strategy that was used. So what can be taken away from this in regards to other businesses? As I read the book, here are the thoughts I had.

A challenger needs to challenge, in essence, everything – you can’t compete with the ‘big boys’ on their terms because, well, bigger is better. The ‘big boys’ base decisions on talent, which in itself is a somewhat intangible metric (handing out large contracts to middle of the road players is part of the reason why the NBA nearly didn’t have a basketball season this year). So put the focus on what can be measured that is meaningful, and make decisions with that in mind. Einstein said it best “Not all the numbers that can be counted count.”

Manage change management – you need to have buy-in throughout the entire organisation. This was important for the Oakland A’s at all levels: the scouts needed to understand what was important to look for when evaluating prospects, the minor league feeder teams need to teach players to play a particular way, and the managers need to ensure that their way of thinking was embedded throughout the entire team. Keep everyone aware and informed around what you are looking to do, and ensure compliance with the plan is being met by holding everyone accountable for their actions.

Understand you can’t have it all – if you did, you’d just be competing in the big boy field. In essence, this means that you are competing in areas they are ignoring because the trade-offs are either too high or you’re making a decision with an element of risk attached to it. Keep your focus on what you are looking to achieve, and where you can get true value. In Moneyball land, this means that you are willing to trade off fielding errors for a higher extra on-base percentage. (Interestingly, Tampa Bay, as discussed earlier, have zigged here and put their time and energy into fielding, because people like Billy Beane were seen to be undervaluing it.)

It’s a war, not a battle – give yourself time to evaluate the strategy, and don’t be tempted to give up on it too soon. Make sure you re-evaluate success against the metrics you have set out to be important, but stay nimble enough to adapt your game plan along the way if things aren’t working. The Oakland A’s did that by trading players that didn’t quite fit their plans or weren’t performing as expected. Notably this wasn’t solely about cutting their losses, but by recognising what other teams overvalued they were able to make deals that turned out to be advantageous for them.

Glenn Jamieson is the Head of Data Integration and Efficiency at Metrix Consulting. He is also a passionate fan of sports.