Zain Jaffer is a real estate and property tech investor who sold his mobile ad startup Vungle in 2019 to private equity firm Blackstone.
We are all creatures of habit. We wake up in the morning, do our rituals, drink coffee and eat breakfast, then head off to work. During weekends, we may have a different routine like playing golf or gardening. Many of us have some type of regimentation to our schedules. This is good especially if our role at work and at home is to be consistently there and on time.
Oftentimes however this regimentation and almost Pavlovian (remember the dog and the bell) thinking carries over to how we react and respond to situations. Many times this is not a bad thing. If we are playing basketball with someone and we see that our playmate is about to take a bad fall, or give us an assist pass, then we react within a split second because we already know what to do in that situation.
In most cases, reacting in the way we are trained and conditioned is a good thing, especially in most safety situations.
However, as we have seen not just in the recent elections but in many situations, we often fall back into “canned” reflexive answers when we are asked a question. Sometimes because the situation seems similar, we blurt out these answers. If in a corporate tactical situation, such as an airline responding to an aircrash crisis, again this is a good thing.
It is not a good thing however if the situation is not an emergency and there is no time constraint that prevents us from first looking at the data. Going back to the airline example, although it is good that an airline would be reflexive in terms of its response to an emergency, it is not good for air crash investigators to immediately conclude the root cause without deliberately looking at the black box, the flight data and voice cockpit recorder, and whatever data and debris they can find. In those instances, we want the investigators not to assume anything at the start, to be methodical, and to make decisions after a careful analysis of the data.
To be successful in business and in life requires that we are able to make split second reflexive and instinctive decisions if the situation is critical and fits our normal patterns. However we also need to take advantage of data analysis when we see a change.
For example, if you just recently ran a new ad campaign over traditional and social media, and your sales numbers immediately went up, of course you would celebrate it with your team. But it should not stop there. A successful business will understand the impact of what it spent for and its actions. Did the positive impacts come from the traditional ads or social media for example? Maybe Millennials and Gen X get there information in one way, while Gen Z gets it elsewhere.
I have seen people my age ask what Discord and podcasts are. The fact that they are asking those questions would be bad if they were running marketing campaigns for my company. It would tell me they are still using a Boomer/Millennial/Gen X marketing framework.
Much has been made of the inability of political campaigns in past elections to not understanding the electorate, the demographics, the issues that are important to them, and the channels by which they consume information. This is also true in business. If your Gen Z audience has migrated to Youtube and Spotify podcasts, not understanding that could be fatal to your business if that demographic had been your target all along.There are times, especially when you have the luxury of time to do data analysis, to delve into your data and understand exactly how the public perceives (or not) your Company. Understanding the wealth of information at your disposal could prevent you from being blindsided and wondering what happened, and enjoying the fruits of your business success.