Could data analysis replace intuition and creativity as the next best skill for tomorrow’s digital marketers? All signs are pointing in that direction, or at least towards a fusion of data and content. Especially within the Retail industry, with consumer trends flowing from in-store, in-app, or online, retailers have an abundance of data to make sense of and capitalize on, data that can influence powerful marketing strategies. Dr. Axel Stock, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Central Florida, joins us on this episode of our Digital Marketing Professor Series, to add his decades of experience to the conversation.

Dr. Stock has found that, as company structures evolve, so do their marketing strategies. Information is more available to everybody on the commercial level; the entry-point for understanding the statistical growth and trends of your company. Data and analysis are becoming a prerequisite for marketing students looking to enter a changing landscape, who now take courses on programming language. The consumer is evolving too; they're more savvy and aware of the best deals, and are looking for marketing that is less distracting and disruptive, according to Stock. All in all, traditional marketing is seeing a statistical and content-focused swing.

“Decisions at the higher levels of the organization will be driven more by scientists, increasingly,” Dr. Stock said. “Currently in those more academic areas within organizations, where you would have positions that were traditionally marketing people, now you have physicists and engineers because they have more background in programming. Since these large sets of data need a particular skill first to collect them and analyze them, the traditional marketing graduate would not be able to do that.”