Most marketers will acknowledge the importance of customer data, if not claim to be 100%  'data- driven' in their day-to-day activities. So I like the idea that, as the title suggests, the majority of our decisions are based on hard customer data, or are driven by a desire to gather the hard data required to be data driven, (just a frisson of guilt as I say this). I also like these traditional data marketing homilies - please forgive the lack of attribution, none  of these are mine;

• Facts are facts. Statistics are more flexible. (Mark Twain I think)
• Old customer data analysts never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.
• In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data.
• For a list of ways technology has removed the personal touch from service, press 1.

And a new one that caught my attention;

• What happens in Vegas, stays in... Facebook, twitter, YouTube, Google....

We have always had a simple approach to the job of getting insight into customer needs and attitudes. We think you should ask them. The more you ask them, within the limits of being annoying, the better. That is one of the reasons we got involved in the business of on-line communities with our clients. Seems to us that selling is simpler if you know what customers want to buy and for what reason. Once again, within reason. This means that we get to read a LOT of customer generated content. But for our sins we also run a steady stream of surveys to drill down on emerging issues or issues of particular interest. We particularly like a survey strategy that exploits volume to reveal the Crowd's Wisdom. We do not rely on a relatively small number of customers to rate&rank the large number of ideas produced by a healthy community (a survey strategy based on the concept of customer attention scarcity). Rather we revel in the abundance of collective attention offered inside a large community and do the opposite - we use a large number of customers to rate & rank a relatively small number of ideas then assemble the mosaic. Statistically the results are identical but the shorter the better for surveys! In both cases you end up knowing which ideas are;

• the most popular &
• most important to
• the largest number of customers.

This lets you focus on the right things - assuming of course that the right thing is having the largest impact on the largest number of customers. This is not always true for paradigm-changing innovations but is generally enough to be "getting on" with. We are also working on the other part of knowing - innovation that reveals the needs you did not know you had until you see it... stay tuned * Not sure who first said this, but credit where due; this was the tagline used by Carlson Marketing's Decision Science division during my time with them.