I’m moving my blog over to a more grown up platform thanks to some friends at UnReal Web Marketing and one of the first posts they selected for the test site was titled “Dashboard My Ass.” Dashboards are the rage for senior executives today, putting all the important business metrics at their fingertips. And as we know, metrics are Nirvana (sorry Kurt) in marketing today. I love metrics, don’t get me wrong, but in my work they can’t fuzzy the judgment.
Taking 10 or 20 sales measures off a dashboard and building market segments, salesforces, ad campaigns, and new products teams around them is complex business. At a big company, this work may take scores of people. (Think Yahoo.) But how do you make sense of all that dashboard data and product planning activity in a way that is simple, easy-to-digest, and meaningful for consumers? How do you create a simple branding idea out of all that complex data?
Well, you don’t do it with a dashboard. It’s a brains and hearts thing. When the Galvanic Skin Response of the executive team starts to perk, that’s when you know you have an idea. I never saw a dashboard buy soap powder. Peace.
