Customer Insights with Google Executive & NED Tina Daniels

Tina Daniels is Director of Agency and Brand Measurement Analytics at Google and a Non-Executive Board Director at Cint.

Tina is a digital veteran with a background from digital marketing agencies and from Microsoft. She also serves as Board Director on both listed companies and educational institutions.

Tina is passionate about better understanding and communicating with customers, continued learning, and doing good for society.

The episode is recorded as both an Audio and Video Podcast. It focuses on Tina’s journey, insights from her experience in the customer research and digital marketing industry, and how boards can up their game.

“Boards need to be a lot more focused on who their customers are, what their expectations are, and how they should plan for the rapidly changing environment” – Tina Daniels

Welcome to listen and learn about

• About Tina Daniels and how it all started
• Learning to think critically
• Value of education
• Role at Google
• A fast-transforming industry
• The stronger voice of Customers
• Importance of Data
• Board advice
• What inspires Tina   
• Tina as an artform

Digital Marketing, Customer Research, and Board Insights

Tinas is experienced in developing online marketing strategies, in creating advertising campaigns, related performance metrics, analysis and connected data capabilities. She shares insights from her journey and the importance of understanding your customer.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing and branding trends include

• In digital marketing, brands use data and technology to target specific audiences and deliver personalized experiences, shifting from a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Social media and other visual platforms have made visual content such as images and videos integral to digital marketing and branding.
• The influencer marketing trend has become popular in digital marketing, with brands partnering with social media influencers and celebrities to promote their products.

Marketing organizations still face a steep learning curve regarding data analytics and converting the data to actionable insights, according to research published in HBR. The authors, professors and a google colleague of Tina Dennis Cardoso, advise organizations to double down on strategic experimentation, deepen cross-functional collaboration, embrace a culture of innovation, focus on driving growth, leverage first-party data, and invest in AI .

Google has ventured into new research called the Open Creative Project, exploring the need and role of creative in the industry.  Some findings include that organizations increased the collaborations with creators and the influexncer marketing budget increased 50 % between 2018-2021.

Customer Research and Analytics

Customer Research and Analytics is characterized by

• Using big data analytics, businesses are gathering insights and making data-driven decisions to improve customer experience with the growing amount of data available.
• The use of predictive analytics helps businesses understand customer behavior and anticipate their needs and preferences by analyzing historical data and predicting future outcomes.
• An organization can use customer journey mapping to understand the entire customer experience, from initial contact to purchase. In this way, businesses can identify areas for improvement and provide a seamless customer experience.

As referenced by recent research by McKinsey published in HBR, it is crucial to establish customer trust when engaging with the organization and the benefit they can expect. Organisations need to develop and nurture a process of privileged insights, which will likely be based on both asking customers and understanding their behaviors.

One of the most critical steps marketers can take is to improve online privacy. It was found in research by Google and Ipsos that 49% of participants said they would switch from their first-choice brand if they had a positive privacy experience with their second-choice brand.

Understanding your target marekt is cruicial. One way to improve the understanding is to survey the market to understand better and define the customers, as shared in this article by Cint.

Google is continuously working on improving its products further with AI. In this article, Google CEO Sundar Pichai shares that the most extensive AI computations double every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. Google plans to introduce a service called Bard, combining the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s large language models.

Boards and Customer Insights

As Tina advises in the interview, boards must ensure significantly better and more current insights into customers’ needs and behaviors and how digital transformation is progressing across the organization. She also highlights the benefit of bringing a strategic marketing voice into the boardroom.

From a survey by EY it is clear that the board’s effectivness in oversight of customer need and driving innovation in the offerings still has considerable room for improvement;

 They also find that it’s clearly in the knowledge area that would have greatest effect

Bringin the customer voice into the boardroom can be done in several ways, as shared by Spencer Stuart

Bringing a strategic marketing professional can be of great value, as found by Deloitte and shared in this Wall Street Journal article and this Ivey Business Journal article

Another approach to finding new interest is to regularly bring the customer directly into the boardroom, as advocated by Professor Baeyens

Setting up your own Google Alert

Finally, the board can improve by keeping a better tap on the sentiment of their own company and the customer’s view of the same. A great tool available to all board members is to use their arrangement of following what is being said about their own companies via Google Alerts. Board members can easily add mentions about the company they like to follow and get daily alerts in their mailbox. The outline of how to create alerts can be found in this article or insights on youtube here.

Customer insights are crucial to growing the organizations’ value creation capability. The insights build on customer trust and active data collection and integration nurturing. Marketing is continuing its transformation to more personalization and adding value via creative collaborations with influencers.

Boards are uniquely positioned to ensure continued and improved customer insight for the company.

Learn More 

About Tina Daniels

Tina Daniels at LinkedIn

Tina Daniels at Twitter

Announcement at Cint

More about Cint

Some other relevant articles and sources

Think with Google 

How Technology will revolutionise marketing (Forbes Article)

Customer experience in the age of AI (HBR article)

CMO Survey Results

The board perspective, a collection of McKinsey insights

This blog post was originally shared at the blog of Digoshen   www.digoshen.com,  and the blog of the Digoshen founder www.liselotteengstam.com

At Digoshen, we work hard to increase #futureinsights and help remove #digitalblindspots and #sustainabilityblindspots. We believe that Companies, Boards, and Business Leadership Teams need to understand more about the future and the digital & sustainable world to fully leverage the potential when bringing their business into the digital & more sustainable age. If you are a board member, consider joining our international board network and master programs.

To understand where you and your company stand in digital business and leadership progress, take our survey at Digoshen.com/research and get a free-of-charge personalized report with recommendations on moving forward. The survey is anonymous and takes about 15 minutes to complete.

You will find more insights via Digoshen Website, and you are welcome to follow us on LinkedIn Digoshen @ Linkedinand twitter: @digoshen  and founder @liseeng