Storytelling With Data

We live in a world where data is currency. This isn’t news at this point, it just is. What we fail to acknowledge with that statement is the fact that currency is designed for transacting. Data, on the other hand, is designed for communicating.

At Brooks Bell, we generate a lot of data as we create, scale and evolve experimentation programs with and for our clients. But that data alone isn’t where the power resides — it’s how we use data to inform our decisions, our recommendations, and our discussions with each other and our clients. It’s how we craft a story integrated with data that positions measures and metrics as the ultimate starting point in any collaboration, both internal and external.

As a cross-functional team, we can review data following an experiment and determine a winning concept, but we’re also responsible for leveraging that data to understand what insight could be derived and how it may impact not just a single interaction within an experience but how it might create impact at scale for the rest of our client’s organization.

Data is both King and Queen, but their royal highnesses are still left rudderless without one’s ability to interpret and tell a story with that data.

This belief drives our effort to always pair quantitative research with qualitative studies. It’s fundamental to understand how customers have acted historically but it’s even more crucial to empathize with and project how they might act in the future.

When we start placing data within the axes of customer intention and business objectives we begin realizing the power of a data-driven organization. That value becomes amplified as we seek to design transformative experiences, identify new market opportunities, create new experimentation and learning curriculums, and most importantly as we work to build upon actions of our customers to uncover their nuanced motivations, intentions and unmet needs.

Being data driven is the starting point. Injecting data with story—filled with emotion and intention—with context and curiosity, is where this new currency really begins to prove its value. That’s the difference between data driven and customer centric. From understanding what’s happened to designing what’s to come.