The head of marketing will soon be spending more on IT than the head of IT, so a recent study by Gartner found. Last week at the annual adfest in Cannes, Ogilvy's top creative warned of how too much faith was being put into data and not enough into ideas. This was resulting in well planned and placed ads that don't actually achieve much.

Where is the real value to be found in marketing?

The more things change the more they stay the same. The problem in the past was IT managers spent a fortune, first on hardware and then software to sytemise the running of the business. Whether or not the customers' experience was improved was not the concern of the CIO. You only had to dial 3 for support to know that. The main focus of the CIO was all about having bragging rights his IT budget was bigger than the competitors'.

Now we are seeing marketing managers playing the same game, "my Big Data budget is bigger than yours." Businesses are paying more and more to collect big brother levels of information on people. You've experienced the result like everyone else – being hit with ads on Facebook when all you want to do is see a picture of a friend's fishing trip. This may be how Zuckerberg will try to make an earn for shareholders, it isn't the road to marketing Nirvana. Just like the IT managers of the past, what the customer wants once again isn't the focus.

The constant here is managers within the business concentrating on the business of the business, rather than looking for ways to make a customer's life better. You probably recognise the trap, I fell for it. For several years I paid too much time and money on experienced professional staff and IT consultants to implement and manage programs to systemise my business. None of it added to the power of connecting and motivating, inspiring or creating. It was money spent on smooth bureaucracy for neatness sake and failed to grow my customers' businesses, nor consequently my own.

Rational Vs emotional marketing approach

"Investment" in IT has always been a rational spreadsheet sell to the chief decision maker. How often have you witnessed a marketing department asking for a "brand building" budget lose out to the CIO who could promise a guaranteed ROI from some new IT? Problem is marketers seem to be giving up the fight at the board level for using emotion to connect with customers, instead choosing the easy route of asking for funding for data. Spend X get Y. Yet economic modelling consistently shows the customer is innately irrational, human beings are pre-programmed that way. This is at the heart of getting the best marketing ROI.

Your customers are more emotional when making purchase decisions than rational

The influential role of emotion in consumer behavior is well documented, here is a summary by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California –

• MRI neuro-imagery shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).
• Advertising research reveals that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content – by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.
• Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation concluded that the emotion of “likeability” is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.
• Studies show that positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments which are based on a brand’s attributes.

So it follows a business that concentrates on chasing efficiency by spending big on data risks failing to connect on the more powerful emotional level.

Challenger brands care most about what the customer thinks matters most

Challenger brands that actually care about what customers want are winning by using the Cloud to remove superfluous steps from the delivery of products and services, often without big IT budgets. One example I know intimately is an Australian first, UNOsmsf, Cloud based Self Managed Super.

The rational customer benefit: More choice, more control, lower fees. We'll be using an emotional truth to appeal to prospective clients: your fund can do better than your mates with more money who are paying through the nose for an average product the big banks want to sell them using big data.

Check out the superannuation challenger brand taking on the banks from the Cloud.