1826 1923 1 Analytics The history of the data economy 18 arrives The world has changed dramatically over the past 200 years. Data is now the fuel that drives business, identifying potential markets, shaping new products, and targeting would-be consumers. To understand where we may be heading next, Impact has partnered with Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, to jointly publish a series exploring the past, present and future of the data economy. The second part tells the story of the arrival of analytics and efforts to better understand consumer behaviour using new data sources. By Timandra Harkness S eeing is the new asking. Thats what Stephan Gans, chief insights and analytics officer at PepsiCo, constantly tells his colleagues. If you ask a mother, or you ask a dad, what do you give your kid in his lunchbox that he takes to school? you can predict what the answer is going to sound like, says Gans, because the dad wants to be seen as a responsible dad. So, theres some fruit, theres some this, theres some that. But by recording what actually happens, using 24/7 cameras in peoples kitchens, analysed by artificial intelligence, researchers found that one conscientious father packed his sons lunchbox every day with carrots, fruit, and so on, and every day the boy came home with his lunchbox completely intact. The child found eating all those carrots took up too much valuable play time and he bought something quick to eat instead. You would have never learned that from the dad, 38 Impact ISSUE 34 2021_pp38-41_DataEconomy.indd 38 says Gans. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with asking questions. People might tell you what they believe to be true, or what they want to be true. The actual truth, though, may elude even the most diligent of interviewers. Henry Durant, the first president of the Market Research Society, knew of these problems with survey-based data collection, and warned about them in the 1950s (as we learned in the previous article in this series). As technology has developed and the data economy has evolved, seeing has become the new asking. Jon Ward, vice-president of sales EMEA at eyetracking company Tobii, offers another example of direct observation being more informative than asking questions. A lot of people will say theyre not price sensitive, and then completely demonstrate price-sensitive behaviour when they are not being asked, because its like saying, Are you cheap? Of course Im not 22/06/2021 16:08