Book Review 4: Sexy Little Numbers by Dimitri Maex

Sexy Little Numbers: How to Grow Your Business Using the Data You Already Have

The best advice I give to clients on strategy - but also the most easily overlooked - is simply, start from where you are.

Everyone wants to look forward to the next technology which will transform their business, or to the newest methodology or to a new team. I can understand this itch for the future: I feel it too. But we have to start somewhere and that means we have to start here.

In the case of data analytics, as a means of understanding and re-imagining business, the answers people want always seem to lie just beyond their current systems. So they look for new data sources and new platforms and tools to work with. Most recently we have looked to Big Data, but in the rush to go big, there are plenty of sexy little numbers we overlook.

And so to this little book by Dimitri Maex, formerly of Ogilvy and Mather and now CEO at Initiative. His practical examples are focussed on marketing, but the principles apply to all. Dimitri starts from where you are; your existing data is more than enough to generate real insight and to inform practical strategy.

The writing is deliberately plain (I think a co-author, Paul Brown was involved too) and for those who like to-do lists, each chapter includes an action plan of Things To Do Monday Morning. The first thing to do, on the first Monday. Define what a valuable customer means for your company. That’s plain, but I know countless companies with stacks of strategy plans, who could not give a straight definition right now.

The book touches on a wide range of subjects, despite the clear focus: customer loyalty, data visualization, KPIs and scorecards, privacy, research. Equally, although the examples are focussed on what you can do today, you’ll learn plenty about advanced analytics including clustering, Markov chains, segmentation and optimisation.

Marketing and Beyond

If you work in marketing, reading the publisher’s blurbs for Sexy Little Numbers, you may feel like you know much of this. Indeed you may feel at first glance that the book is a little dated. And for sure, some insights to technologies like Social Networks have been overtaken by the remarkable growth of these platforms. But to get hung up on that, would be to miss the value of the book, which is not tied to technologies or techniques. Rather the book astutely distills principles of analysis into pragmatic steps. This is what makes it perfect for starting where you are.

If you don’t work in marketing, but are interested in data analysis, this book is a model for how to look at a problem space, identify the resources currently available and work through them systematically and practically. It shows well how to add value with every step. There is so much data already available but largely unused; , so many metrics we could attend to, but don’t; so much insight we overlook and so many actions we fumble as a result.

The plain style of this book leads to some little nuggets that are not called out as aphorisms, but are still memorable.

Best practices … aren’t difficult; the catch is, you need to do them.

And so, like so many of the books I recommend, I return to this book again and again, whenever I feel things are getting over-complicated. The little numbers are sexy.