“Data is everything,” said Joel Warady, general manager of chief sales and marketing officer at Enjoy Life Foods, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mondelez. “[There’s] this idea of thinking digitally but acting analog, so one of the ways that we apply our data is by going to consumer-facing events and having different opportunities for consumers to provide us with data on a one-to-one basis, face-to-face. ... We take that data and build our CRM, and we're constantly going to our current database within our CRM and asking for more data. So, we are on a constant pursuit.”
Danielle Brown, CMO at Knix, agreed that you can never have too much data. But before marketers set out on a path to acquire as much first-party data as possible, they must first think about how they’re eventually going to use it.
“Sure, I want more, but what am I going to do with it?” Brown said. “It's really important to build a purpose-driven data story, because the things that you can do with that first-party data are things that lead you to be able to scale. ... The more I know about my customer, the more I can go out and find other great customers like her. And so do I have enough? No. I'd really like more. It is the data that I have organized well enough? It is. It's getting better, but I think we're in this position ... where we could probably do better with the data that we have before we go organize more.”