Worryingly, the ‘future of marketing is all about mathematics’ according to one successful data guru, whom I seriously hope has got it wrong.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that data can add wonderful value to retailers’ businesses but to me it has a ‘looking-over-your-shoulder’ aspect to it.

Data is great for telling you where you have gone wrong but not so good at indicating what you should be doing in the future.

The reality is that breakthroughs come from talented people who understand shoppers and do things differently because they instinctively believe it makes sense.

Tim Mason, the brilliant former marketing director at Tesco, was proof of how this thinking can have a dramatic effect on business.

He is certainly no slouch when it comes to data (he was after all the man who championed Clubcard at Tesco) but his ‘One in Front’ campaign to ensure extra tills were opened up if queues started to build was in no way supported by data.

The decision to run with it was wholly based on people and common sense. He just knew it was what the customers would want.

He took it to the Tesco board without any possibility of quantifying its benefits to the business. I recall Tim told me he had no data-supported ROI calculations to run by them.

But he won their support and then changed the industry. Bold and right and profitable.  I was marketing director of B&Q at the time and customers immediately demanded that we employ the same initiative. It’s so difficult to see the smile on a shopper’s face with stats.

Data can be great for helping create clear briefings and quantifying actions but it takes human beings to make the decisions from that data. And retail businesses are certainly generating plenty of it today.

Seb James, chief executive of Dixons Carphone, describes it as our ‘digital exhaust’ of rich information that retailers are now monitoring.

This data is potentially good for the customer experience: enriching the conversation whether in-store or online.

If we always rely solely on data in our decision making then we would never make counterintuitive moves and, as we all know, retail can be all about making the changes that simply feel right because we know our shoppers.

I do hope the data guru never forgets shopping is about people.

Einstein had it about right when he suggested: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

  • Stephen Robertson is a non-executive director of Timpson Group and Clipper Retail Logistics