TechBytes with Mindy Pankoke, Product Manager, Consumer Marketing Data Solutions, Experian

Mindy Pankoke
Product Manager, Consumer Marketing Data Solutions, Experian

Good data can drive great customer experience. With changing expectations on customer experience, there has never been an accurate estimation of what the best “Customer Experience’ feels like. While modern marketers aggressively approach a customer-centric model to build experience programs across channels, an ideal experience could either be an everlasting moment or one that is forgotten in the blink of an eye. To better understand how brands build their customer experience and establish brand connect with the audience, we chatted with Mindy Pankoke, Product Manager, Consumer Marketing Data Solutions at Experian. Mindy is also an author at Marketing Forward Blog.

MTS: Tell us about your role at Experian and the team you handle?
My role is to help marketers connect with consumers. Brands know the customer experience is the number one priority – particularly from a marketing perspective. The data products I manage exist to help marketers create and deliver messages that revolve around and resonate with the target audience. At Experian, I oversee multiple consumer data products – including our Mosaic® USA lifestyle segmentation system – aimed to help marketers better understand their target audience beyond the superficial level, and truly gain insight into their tendencies and preferences to help brands make stronger, longer lasting connections with consumers. 

MTS: How is Experian different from contemporary customer experience management companies that service B2B clients?
Whether a consumer, advertiser or B2B company, at the end of the day, we help brands connect with people – we do this using quality data, as well as marketing solutions that make it easy to activate this people-to-people connection. Our approach to helping marketers improve the customer experience is built around our comprehensive ConsumerView database that enables brands and agencies to determine their right audience, what channels to communicate through, what messages will resonate and how to measure campaign success. Once we help to intelligently and effectively establish the “who,” our audience deployment or activation services, as well as our comprehensive omni-channel measurement services serve to close the loop, so to speak. Our difference is our ability to help companies better understand the consumer, optimize marketing content and act by successfully reaching the target audience and measuring what works.

MTS: What are the core tenets of Experian’s Social Media Analysis platform?
Experian’s social media data solutions leverage consumer digital word of mouth to make the brand-to-consumer connection even more powerful. The remarkable aspect of social media is that it isn’t just a channel for brands and agencies to listen to conversation or push brand messages –  there’s a real opportunity to understand the “who behind the handle.” Social media is 100 percent consumer-generated, which means it’s an organic view into the interests and opinions of the consumer. Given that consumers need to be at the core of every marketing strategy, social media data provides that missing piece to the puzzle. As marketers, we have an opportunity to gain insight into any audience, append the information to enhance our existing customer sets, predict behavior and through analytics, create consistent cross-channel audiences built using actions such as “consumers who engage with my brand on social media.”  Our social media capabilities are designed to provide not only social insights about any online or offline target audience, but also enable brands and agencies to adjust messaging, make more informed media buys or uncover new brand partnerships.

As for the core tenets of Experian’s Social Media Analysis solution, this web-based interactive report has three core “tenets.” I’ve referred to the key components of this solution as the holy trio of marketing data all in one digestible yet comprehensive package. First, you find a robust report of social insights, categorized as well as broken out by specific brand and interest for any given online or offline audience. This provides insights straight from the consumer segment’s “digital word of mouth” that can be leveraged for content optimization, media buying and other marketing strategies. Second, since these social insights are tied to actual known people from the Experian ConsumerView database, you also learn the core demographic profile of the audience you aim to better understand and reach. And the third core component of Experian’s social media analysis is the Mosaic^TM makeup of the audience. What life stages represent consumers engaging with your competitors on social media? Perhaps most are Sports Utility Families, who joyfully run to and from various extracurricular activities and live in outlying suburbs.  Knowing the demographics, lifestyles and action-based hot topics of your audience puts brands in the winner’s circle for making tighter connections with customers.

MTS: What are the imminent GDPR-borne disruptions you predict for consumer data management platforms? How are you preparing for this disruption?
We recognize the importance of GDPR and its implications. And at the end of the day, consumers will always be at the heart of everything we do. Core data beliefs, such as transparency and security are always top of mind for our business, and will continue to be so.

MTS: What are the major pain points for CIOs and CTOs in adopting full-scale AI analytics platforms for business anomalies and predictive modeling?
The technology behind artificial intelligence continues to evolve daily. While brands and organizations will likely approach AI by experimenting and testing new data sets, it’s important they do not lose sight of the questions and problems they are trying to solve for. It helps ensure the application of the technology supports their objectives.

MTS: How critical is it for modern brands to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities for better data and analytic management?
From a marketing perspective, brands that leverage new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can uncover deep insight about their target audiences. Those insights can help create a more positive experience for consumers. We have a research and development group called the Experian DataLab, where we constantly test new data sets and new tools to create a better tomorrow for our clients and customers. But we also have a team that oversees optimization for digital ad campaigns – pulling insights to learn and retarget more effectively; enabling brands to create and deliver powerful communications.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Mindy.
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