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Kian Conley, Senior Vice President, Consumer Strategy, Hilton Grand Vacations

Describe your career to date

Data and analytics have always been the core of my career success and enabled expertise in marketing and operations. My early career was grounded in data-driven, analytical marketing – coming at marketing problems from a segmentation or customer attribute point-of-view, test-and-learn, measurement and business case modelling. That experience evolved overtime to include the full marketing process of using data to find insights, using those insights to inform a marketing strategy, implementing the strategy using channels, creative and copy to communicate customer-facing campaigns.  

 

Along the way I added managing operations-at-scale to my toolbox – applying my data and analytics background to develop robust measurement processes to identify efficiency opportunities and creating reporting disciplines to tightly manage and ensure consistent performance across multi-site, multi-function service-delivery networks.   

I am not a data scientist, nor do I have a technical-skilled data background. My expertise is in understanding how data can be leveraged to drive business results – being able to implement data-driven insights into marketing tactics and business strategies. 

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey?

My team has learned that when business owners have confidence in the data, understand what it can and cannot do and is consistently applied, they directly impact bottom-line results and key business metrics of the firm. They are now iterating on that success to find other parts of the enterprise they can impact. 

 

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

The data and analytics team is part of my larger marketing organization. I don’t view data and analytics as a stand-alone function, but as an imbedded capability within the marketing process. Sometimes that capability is uncovering insights that inform a larger strategy or identifies an opportunity leading to a new marketing tactic or program. Other times it is building models and scoring our consumer database to enable segmentation and personalization throughout different points in the customer journey. And still other times it is identifying underlying drivers of consumer behavior or business trends. 

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization

I see three main challenges for our data practice in general:

1)  Ensuring we have existing processes to handle current data-privacy requirements and that we are building flexible capabilities to deal with evolving future requirements.

2) Effectively linking known and unknown identities and attributes across multi-channel, multi-device, multi-platform interactions in order to provide relevant content and experiences to our customers.

3) Understanding advances in artificial intelligence and determining how can they, and should they, be leveraged in our existing data and analytics function.  

 

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

Our company has embraced the concept that using data can enhance business results. We’ve proven and gained adoption in many parts of our sales and marketing funnels. The next phase is to expand the use of data to more parts of the customer journey. 

 

Our vision is that data, when used correctly and consistently, enables better decision-making. Those decisions occur at various points in the marketing funnel and customer journey. When used effectively, the use of data, throughout the organization at key customer touchpoints, will deliver increases in revenue, decrease cost and improve the customer experience. 

 

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?

Data as a foundational capability – including quality and hygiene – is an ongoing deliverable for our organization. I would characterize our progress in this area as: 

1) We’ve identified and understand the issues. 

2) We’ve created workarounds to enable business processes,

3) However, to continue to scale and advance data as a strategic asset, we need to continue to invest in our data environment, capabilities and tools. 

Kian Conley
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2023 (USA)

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