Google and the Harvard Business Review partnered on a fantastic white paper titled “Marketing in the driver’s seat: Using analytics to to create customer value.” The paper features excellent case studies from companies including Lenovo, Netflix, Harrah’s Entertainment, MetLife, and Adidas.

I highly recommend reading the entire white paper (link below), but here are some of my key takeaways from the report:

Above-average analytics implementers outpace their business competitors by 2-3 times on sales, margin, profit and TSR (total shareholder return).
Most organizations are integrating only a few sources of customer and marketing data. Those that leverage multiple sources and focus diligently on demand generation have significantly stronger business performance, especially total shareholder return.
A recent Gartner study found that improving customer experience is the number one expectation CEOs have of their marketing executives.
Many companies are not gaining competitive advantage from analytics because they are still focused on product-centric strategies (developing new products and then boosting profits by seeking economies of scale in marketing and operations) instead of applying formal measurement of customer value to drive and evaluate product changes.
Research conducted by Accenture found that a lack of [data science] talent isn’t the primary challenge to achieving competitive advantage with analytics – the biggest stumbling block is moving from data to insight to action.

Click here to gain access to the entire white paper.