HiFive Ice Creams is a premium ice cream retailer, with a strong urban presence and dozens of ice cream parlours in several major cities. HiFive implemented a new offering called “mix-ins” which they describe as a “create your own ice cream” concept. Customers have the ability to select from available ingredients, which are mixed into their ice cream, resulting in a unique and customized flavour experience based on the selected ingredients.

HiFive executives routinely relied upon social media to connect with their customers and had used it to fuel brand recognition and brand experience. They attributed much of the company's success to their creative use of social media. To maximize the results of deploying their limited marketing budget, the ice cream retailer had decided to measure the success of its social media marketing efforts and created an appropriate approach.

.1    The Data Team's Work

The retailer developed a unique strategy to measure social media return on investment (ROI) and word-of-mouth value. A data team, including marketing sciences experts, data scientists, and business data analytics experts, was assembled. The team created an automated model that predicted the monetary value of social media marketing spend based on HiFive's objectives. The underlying framework for the automated model included a couple of unique metrics. Influence (IE) was developed to measure the net influence wielded by a user in a social network and predicted that user's ability to generate the spread of viral information. An additional metric, influence value (IV), measured the associated word-of-mouth linked to the actual sales that it generated.

Additionally, HiFive developed a process that helped them measure, monitor, and aggregate the data supplied by these metrics. Particular attention was focused on trends and analyzing the results. Over time, a strategy was developed that refined marketing activities to increase IE and IV, thereby positively impacting profit.

.2    Acquisition Proposal

Nine months into this process, HiFive was going through an acquisition bid from a global brand. Prisha Singhal, Director of Marketing from the acquiring organization, discovered this data while reviewing HiFive's strategic marketing plans. It sparked her interest and she decided to directly connect with the team. She was intrigued by the first three steps in this strategy where the team decided that Facebook would be the ideal social network, collecting very specific data and implementing a rewards program for influencers. Specifically, Prisha reached out to the team asking why Facebook was selected.

.3    Data Team's Response

The data science team responded that based on their study, they found Facebook had the highest regional adoption, which was conducive to the research problem. For this reason, they selected Facebook as the optimal medium.

Media	Example	Regional Adoption (#)	Proportion of Local Connection
Blogs	WordPress	37,590	13
Location Sharing	Foursquare	3,100	43
Personal Network	Facebook	64,000	57
Video Blog	YouTube	3,860	12
Micro Blog	Twitter	5,620	29
Virtual World	SecondLife	800	31
Social Coupons	Groupon	-	85

 

.4    The Challenge

Prisha was not convinced by this analysis since it did not clearly justify how the data supports the strategic objective. She asked for additional clarification.

.5    Business Data Analytics Perspective

Chiran Varma is one of the business data analytics professionals on the team, and he stepped in after hearing about this exchange between Prisha and the team. He took the following actions:

1. Chiran completed a quick stakeholder analysis to plan the communication needs for Prisha. Since Prisha is a significant influencer, Chiran concluded that a more active and transparent communication approach is needed
2. Based on that, Chiran requested a meeting to discuss the entire approach and answer any additional questions Prisha may have.
3. He provided the team's background analysis to answer Prisha's question.
4. Chiran realized the information shared with Prisha was inadequate and not at the right level of detail.
5. Chiran knew there were a lot of background details that helped formulate the Facebook decision. He summarized this information and focused on the foundational analysis criteria which could be communicated as simply as possible.
6. Although graphs and tables are great for summarizing information, Chiran knew they need to be clearly communicated.

.6    Outcomes Achieved

Chiran built a simple decision matrix to illustrate why Facebook was chosen (depicted below) provided a clear explanation of how the criteria were relevant for the decision.

Decision Criteria	WordPress	Foursquare	Facebook	YouTube	Twitter	SecondLife	Groupon
Large number of users in a specific locality for a platform greater than 15,000	Yes		Yes				n/a
Percentage of social media contacts within the locality for a user greater than 25%		Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes
Effort required to share the message must be low		Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes
Ease of creating connections to share the message must be simple			Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Total	1	2	4	1	3	3	1

During the subsequent meeting, Chiran reviewed the table and the analysis with Prisha. He made a point of addressing every one of her concerns. Chiran's approach worked and Prisha came away with a solid understanding and a very favourable assessment of the team's work.

.7    Key Takeaways

• Interpreting and reporting results involves translation of the insights into a form that is easily understood by the stakeholders. The outcome of a technical analysis often points to a key fact. A translation of the facts into business relevant insight is needed. In this case, the graphs were translated into a format that is best suited for decision-making.
• One of the key activities in interpreting and reporting results involves communicating in such a way that the results are conveyed at the right level of detail. In this case, a business data analytics expert leveraged stakeholder analysis to focus on the most important information for a key stakeholder.