Reframe The Marketplace: The Total Market Approach to Reaching the New Majority

Chapter 10Step Five: Using Big Data to Measure Total Market Enterprise Results

If The Graduate were filmed today, Mr. McGuire would be telling Ben just two words: big data. Although “plastics,” the advice Dustin Hoffman's character received in the original film, was biting commentary on the world of the time, the advice was wise. Plastics was the business of the era. Today the pot of gold is found in big data. It's used in every business, in every brand, in every marketing department, and in every technology company. Journalists mine it for interesting story angles, politicians natter on about regulation or lack thereof, privacy advocates panic about the implications of it, and, as Edward Snowden showed us, the government is quietly putting it all to use. For our purposes, big data can be used to measure the effectiveness of implementing the Total Market approach both internally and externally.

As I mentioned in Chapter 8, the practice of diversity as it is today is not enough to make an organization New Majority ready. Diversity and inclusion practices have a rather tenuous link to business performance, and it's all but impossible to measure the outcomes of these initiatives by any measure other than talent and supplier mix. As a result, these practices quantify themselves via indirect measures of talent, senior leadership training, compliance classes (constructed to keep Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorneys at bay), and employee retention through employee resource ...