When companies realized data was a resource and not just the by-product of sales, they began to offer customers additional value: free products, savings, money back, even a club-like exclusivity. They often did it, and still do it, with customer loyalty programs, which were frequently expressed in the form of a physical card, such as Starbucks Rewards and MyPanera. But the very biggest companies have changed the loyalty game.
My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s more than one way to bake a cake.’ It’s a softer version of the more famous idiom involving feline taxidermy, but for our purposes, it’s a better metaphor. You can bake a cake without some of the key ingredients like sugar or eggs and it is still technically a cake. It just won’t taste as good as my grandmother’s cake did.
I have written many a post about the importance of keeping your data moving. As Mathew Wilder sang in “Break My Stride,” it’s “got to keep on moving” to enable you to act within the business moment. Real-time data analytic pipelines are the solid foundation to achieving the state of Active Intelligence, and you can only start that when you work on the freshest data available to you.