Recently, I read Data Driven – https://tinyurl.com/57j796jz & one of the case studies was beautifully captured around the use of data and AI revolutionizing marketing. 

Keurig Green Mountain, a single-serve coffee maker company considered as an innovator in home brewing had released a new version of its popular coffee maker around early 2015. Keurig had challenges in establishing close customer relationships due to fickle consumer taste. This developed into an opportunity to become data rich with an IoT strategy. 

Their chief digital and information officer put forward a question to the team that perfectly encapsulates the modern marketer and the adoption of data and AI. “So, I want to put a data collection chip in our machines, but it costs about $5, since we make tens of millions of coffee makers a year, our CFO wants to understand the value of the idea relative to its cost. Can you tell me what it is worth?” 

Keurig is one of the biggest retailers globally but had no way of understanding what coffee people were brewing. Could the company get granular data about different products being consumed throughout the day? Could it read app data points of people and find out who was brewing what in the house? Probably the number of people in the family and their estimated household income? These unanswered questions about their customers was the genesis to come up with an innovative approach to problem solving. 

Ultimately, the company decided to outfit the machine with a compact LCD screen alongside existing sensors, this gave them better access to device data and rich understanding about the people who drink coffee at home, probably more than any other company. Keurig started collecting deeper consumer insights – what they drink, when they drink it, and which brands they are consuming. Any brand that supplied their K-Cup can now leverage access to data about their own customers and build a mechanism to allow people to order right from their machine or, better yet, have the machine place an order when they started running low. 

Keurig was able to move faster and the primary accelerator being their IoT strategy paired with the promise of connected devices. This was fundamental in delighting their customers with personalised recommendations stitched with enhanced product discovery experience. 

This is only one example amongst many companies who are forward-leaning in this space. Heineken uses data to better understand how much beer it can sell to soccer fans & RB is working to find out when people sneeze so that they can sell more Mucinex. Eventually, data-driven marketing is constantly evolving with new touchpoints and data collection methods, all contributing to the modern marketing edifice.