The Hub

Nowadays you can no longer go around growth hacking – just ask Google. The internet is full of growth hacking articles, tools and tactics. If we take a quick look at the search volume on growth hacking, we see that it’s been getting an increasing amount of attention worldwide since 2012. Worldwide Google trends of the search term 'growth hacking'. The term growth hacking was first introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010. In truth, the practice has been around much longer. It helped companies like DropBox, Uber and AirBnB transition from budding startups to multi-million dollar enterprises in just a few years’ time. Much of it comes down to the use of resource-light and cost-effective tactics and processes of continual ideation, prioritization, testing and analysis – with a continuous focus on the one metric that matters most: growth. The term was first used in the start-up scene, where resources are scarce and where growth is the only way to survive. There’s a misconception, however, that growth hacking is only useful for startups. In fact, every company can benefit from it, although a minimum requirement is your product market fit. Growth hacking requires that you have a product that’s not just good, but that also matches the needs of who you’re selling it to. Once that’s in place, you’re good to go. How to get started with growth hacking? For more practical insights, we sat together with Nicholas D'hondt, growth expert at our new spin-off Upthrust, which answers the need for operational digital marketing talents.

This third part of our  3-piece article series based on an interview with marketing professor Koen Pauwels focuses on the “WHO”: Which skills should marketers have to be able to analyze their data?

There was no escaping last week: Black Friday was all over the place. From your mailbox to your social media feed, from the advertisements on Spotify to the promotions on Waze on your way to work – the promotional messages kept popping up. Most people, however, don’t even know what the tradition of Black Friday exactly stands for (watch the video below). So, we’re questioning whether we’re facing a phenomenon that is breaking out of its borders or if we’re just dealing with another sales label to justify early promotions. 

This second part of our 3-piece article series based on an interview with marketing professor Koen Pauwels focuses on the “HOW”: How do marketers use data analytics and how well are they using their tools? Indeed, today the market is filled with an infinite number of data analytics software and tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Marketo, Hubspot, Adobe, Marketing Cloud etc.) that help marketers better understand their customers and answer their needs. Let’s have a look at what Koen Pauwels thinks about it.

Today’s fast-paced, technology-driven society has drastically changed user expectations and led to a more demanding customer base. Businesses today face an entirely new set of challenges and expectations. Luckily, data can give you valuable insights into your customers and prospects. It’s now relatively easy to create a profile of your best buyers, their life-time value, their buying preferences, etc. With the help of data you can now understand, meet, and even predict your customers’ expectations. However, now that most businesses are driven by data, we see other challenges occurring. As tons of data are collected every day, it’s easy for companies or employees to drown in the sea of data they collect, or be intimidated by the pile of information coming at them. And how can we find the relevant data for the business question you want to solve? Moreover, how can your data team make sure the collected data is understood and thus used by everyone within your organization?

Koen Pauwels is a distinguished marketing professor at Northeastern University and BI Oslo. His passion for data and analytics has led him on the road of research and experiments, which have let him discover new insights in marketing productivity, metrics and social media. Today, we can find his work in numerous marketing journals such as the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science and MIT Sloan Management Review. As an active member of the advisory board of The House of Marketing, we regularly have the privilege of discussing with Koen Pauwels on his knowledge and experience in topics such as big data and analytics, and also the econometric modeling of long-term marketing effects. We recently had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about data analytics and the role data takes or will take within marketing. Keeping all his insights for ourselves would have been selfish, so we are happy to share them with you! This article is the first part of the interview focused on the “WHAT”: What does ‘data analytics’ mean and what can marketers gain from it?

Koen Pauwels is a distinguished marketing professor at Northeastern University in Boston and BI Norwegian Business School. His passion for data and analytics has led him to the road of research and experiments, which have let him discover new insights in marketing productivity, metrics and social media.  “As a kid, I loved pouring over maps, hiking through nature and playing with my compass. Just like the mission in Star Trek, I wanted to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations... but then I realized that all new lands had been explored and I turned my attention to the new worlds of science...” Today, we can find his work in numerous marketing journals, such as Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Marketing Science and Management Science. Eager to share his insights, he has also authored a book on modeling markets and on using these insights to improve decisions: It’s not the Size of the Data, It’s How You Use it: Smarter Marketing with Analytics and Dashboards*. “Today, I still feel a bit of that explorer in me. I get to peer into an industry and ask challenging questions, then go out and unearth the answers, to go where no marketing professor has ever gone before.”

If I had to briefly describe myself, I’d say I’m a value-driven marketer and a positive thinker with a strong sense of responsibility. In my daily life, I try to reduce my ecological footprint in incremental steps. I strongly believe that changing something starts with changing your behavior and that changing your behavior starts with small changes to your habits. So instead of turning into vegetarians overnight, my boyfriend and I gradually adapted our eating habits. At the very start, we cooked a few vegetarian dishes a week and ordered meatless courses in restaurants. Those changes eased the full transition to a vegetarian diet. This year we are focused on eating seasonally and reducing our use of plastic.

In the first article of the VoiceTech series: ‘Voice technology: more than a buzzword?’  the basics of this new and exciting technology were discussed. In the second article, ‘Why you should start with Voice Commerce today’, we took a deeper dive into Voice Commerce and elaborated on why you should start with it today. In this third and last article in our voice technology series we will explore the ‘how to’ side of voice technology and guide you through the first steps you can take to start seizing the opportunities that this exciting technology brings to the table. But let’s first take a step back and look at the bigger picture, and how can we do this better than with a short history class?

According to our e-commerce barometer, 27% more e-commerce websites were launched in 2017 compared to the year before. Transaction numbers increased by 39%, which equals over 60 million transactions. Those numbers indicate e-commerce in Belgium is on the rise, regardless of company size. Surfing along on the wave, Jacqmotte, a brand of Dutch coffee and tea company Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE), joined the online retail market by launching their own webshop for a new freshly roasted coffee range.