Why You Should Validate Your Marketing Data Externally

This art­icle col­lab­or­a­tion on mar­ket­ing data first appeared on Whispr Group.

How do you eval­u­ate your mar­ket­ing data?

Imagine sit­ting at your desk with a self-eval­u­ation form to fill out. The stand­ard­ized tem­plate in front of you is there to make your answers more com­par­able and — hope­fully! — guide you through the process. 

Now, accord­ing to your­self, how well did your last mar­ket­ing cam­paign or com­mu­nic­a­tion cam­paign per­form? Ultimately the ques­tion is, how well are you per­form­ing at your job?

Even if you’re being hon­est, how do you know wheth­er or not you’re uncon­sciously biased?

All com­pan­ies are using mar­ket­ing data to eval­u­ate them­selves. But the worse the per­form­ance, the big­ger the risk for skew­ing the analysis. 

So, how do you val­id­ate your busi­ness-crit­ic­al data?

Self-Appraisal is a Poor Solution

Self-apprais­al can be help­ful, for sure. It allows employ­ees to cla­ri­fy their view of their work to be com­pared to that of their man­agers. Also, the ritu­al might encour­age employ­ees to frame their con­tri­bu­tions in a big­ger busi­ness context. 

Unfortunately, bey­ond spe­cif­ic psy­cho­lo­gic­al use cases, the concept of self-apprais­al is mostly a ter­rible idea.

The pur­pose of ana­lyz­ing mar­ket­ing data is all about arriv­ing at action­able insights to inform bet­ter decisions. 

The major­ity of com­pan­ies today are col­lect­ing and ana­lyz­ing their per­form­ance data on the brand level using the self-apprais­al meth­od. To put it mildly: Self-apprais­al isn’t a very sci­entif­ic way to acquire busi­ness-crit­ic­al insights from data.

The polar oppos­ite of self-apprais­al is peer-apprais­al. The main advant­age is obvi­ous — peer-apprais­al is much more effi­cient in pro­du­cing accur­ate knowledge. 

The Fallacy of Overestimating Self-Performance

In Let’s Abolish Self-Appraisal, pub­lished by the Harvard Business Review in 2011, the author and man­age­ment expert Dick Grote writes:

“In research­ing my book How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, I found study after study that con­sist­ently demon­strated that indi­vidu­als are notori­ously inac­cur­ate in assess­ing their per­form­ance, and the poorer the per­former, the high­er (and more inac­cur­ate) the self-appraisal.”

Justin Kruger and David Dunning (as made fam­ous by the dis­cov­ery of the Dunning-Kruger Effect) pub­lished an art­icle in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which they con­clude that less skilled indi­vidu­als suf­fer a dual burden:

“Not only do these people reach erro­neous con­clu­sions and make unfor­tu­nate choices, but their incom­pet­ence robs them of the meta­cog­nit­ive abil­ity to real­ize it.”

Third-Party Insights as a Strategy

Few brands have a strategy or pro­cess to val­id­ate their data analysis.

Companies often alloc­ate money on product launches and mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, yet they usu­ally base these decisions on biased mar­ket­ing data. 

According to what sci­ence implies, self-apprais­al is likely to be used for indi­vidu­al gains or worse — to rein­force an inflated brand image that only exists internally. 

A com­pany eval­u­at­ing its per­form­ance is tread­ing on thin ice.

While it’s true that the digit­iz­a­tion of the busi­ness world offers unpre­ced­en­ted oppor­tun­it­ies for extract­ing data, data is still just a tool. And this is true for all types of tools: If you use it wrong, you might end up hurt­ing your­self instead of fix­ing something.

Whispr Group, as an inde­pend­ent glob­al ser­vice pro­vider tasked with turn­ing data into action­able insights, has taken its stand. Joakim Leijon, Whispr Group’s Founder and CEO, writes:

“Our busi­ness mod­el crit­ic­ally depends on our abil­ity to provide our cli­ents with unbiased and sci­en­tific­ally accur­ate ana­lys­is of their data which they can act on. If we fail in this endeav­our, our cli­ents fail. In our last two NPS sur­veys, we’ve aver­aged an 8,8 out of 10 — which indic­ates that our cli­ents are find­ing our ana­lys­is highly valuable.”

How To Validate Your Marketing Data

Whispr Group sug­gests the fol­low­ing crit­ic­al takeaways in avoid­ing the pit­falls of cor­por­ate self-assess­ment of mar­ket­ing data:

1. Collect and ana­lyze mar­ket­ing data with the intent to gain busi­ness-crit­ic­al know­ledge, not to bol­ster intern­al careers or sup­port already-made decisions (see also: How the right insights will help you set the right KPIs).

2. Always veri­fy your mar­ket­ing data via an inde­pend­ent third-party ana­lyst to avoid the Dunning-Kruger Effect (see also: Get star­ted with insights from Whispr Group).

3. Nurture a cor­por­ate cul­ture that acknow­ledges that the truth can be pain­ful at times but that, by any meas­ure, ignor­ance is far worse for busi­ness. (see also: Stop just col­lect­ing insights and start using the insights from it).

Does your busi­ness need a second opin­ion on a spe­cif­ic data set? Get in touch with one of Whispr Group’s data ana­lysts for a free consultation.