Building an Organization That Embraces Experimentation
Learn how to drive innovation and greater efficiency by creating a culture that supports incrementality from top to bottom.
Putting experimentation at the core of your business can increase the efficiency of your advertising campaigns and help you make smarter decisions. However, realizing the full potential of measurement often entails making deep organizational changes.
Effectively adopting incrementality—rigorous testing and learning to measure marketing’s true value—requires developing a data-oriented culture by revisiting approaches both big and small, from who you hire to the ways in which you give feedback to your teams.
What exactly does it take to build an organization that embraces incrementality? Industry-leading marketers who have put measurement at the heart of their efforts say the keys to success are to establish change from the top down, nurture a culture of experimentation and build the ultimate analytics team. We explore each of these briefly below and in-depth in our comprehensive report, Building an Organization That Embraces Experimentation.
Establish change from the top down
Clear and consistent communication from the top is the best way to implement change in any organization. Shifting your culture to put incrementality at the forefront is no different: It is crucial to ensure buy-in from C-suite executives, create structures that enable incrementality to scale across the organization and have leaders clearly demonstrate that they value data and testing.
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“Leadership should use the insights from the analytics team to inform their actions. If you build an analytics team and they are measuring, analyzing and providing results, using their insights to change your decisions gives them a foundation to stand on.”
—Pete Johnson, Vice President of Advanced Analytics & Marketing Technology, AT&T
Nurture a culture of experimentation
Once leadership is on board, you can focus on building a data-oriented mindset across the rest of your organization by nurturing a culture of experimentation. This entails a wide range of changes, from creating a testing-friendly environment that embraces failure to carving out breathing room for your data-focused team members to explore their ideas. The key is for everyone to feel empowered to adopt incrementality.
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“It is important to see how insights are disseminated across all levels of an organization. The true incremental gains are made in the front line by the folks who are next to the data, making micro-adjustments to learn.”
—Tony Flanery-Rye, Senior Director of Growth Analytics, eBay
Build the ultimate analytics team
To gain truly valuable insights, you want the ultimate analytics team working on your most pressing problems. This begins with hiring whip-smart data scientists, data engineers and analysts. But the process doesn’t stop there: To develop a top-tier data analytics team, you need effective organizational design and management approaches. It also helps to have a diverse mix of viewpoints to ensure that existing assumptions are questioned and fresh solutions are developed.
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“Different personalities and backgrounds bring new skills, approaches and working styles to marketing departments as a whole. Anyone with an analytics team should take the opportunity to champion diversity.”
—Jenny Bullis, Head of Marketing Science EMEA, Facebook
Ultimately, building an organization that embraces incrementality requires consistent effort from top to bottom. While this can feel daunting, the payoff is worth it: A strong, ever-evolving, data-oriented culture can transform your business by helping you to quantify the return on your marketing investments to develop more effective strategies.
Download Building an Organization That Embraces Experimentation for more expert advice on how to create a culture that embraces incrementality and supports measurement from top to bottom.
Hear from marketing leaders
Watch a video featuring marketing leaders from Netflix, eBay and Lyft discuss how they build organizations that embrace experimentation:
What it means for marketers
Embracing experimentation starts at the top.
Buy-in from C-suite executives enables incrementality to scale across the organization. By demonstrating that they value data and testing to learn, leaders can set the tone.
Empower everyone to adopt incrementality.
Instilling a data-oriented mindset across the organization is key to success. This entails a wide-range of changes, from embracing failure as an opportunity to learn and making experimentation everyone's job to enabling teams to explore new ideas.
Develop a top-tier analytics team.
To gain truly valuable insights, it’s necessary to hire the right analytical talent, have a plan for developing strong career paths for that talent, create the right organizational structure and seek out a diverse mix of viewpoints.
Building an Organization that Embraces Experimentation
Resources:
Marketing Measurement Done Right Read what Boston Consulting group has to say about how organizations can better implement incrementality measurement