Is tech savvy genetic or learned? Consider this anecdote from the Georgy household: “My eight-year-old son Nathan told my wife, Marian, recently that he wants to kill bugs when he grows up,” Georgy says. “Marian told him, ‘That’s called an exterminator, Honey,’ and he responded ‘No, mom, software bugs!’ A boy after my own heart.”
Georgy is currently the architect of the Experian Marketing Suite, which endeavors to assist marketers in maximizing the value of every customer interaction by uniting consumer data, customer insights, analytics, data quality, and cross-channel marketing technology. Sales of the suite grew by more than 120% last year, drawing users such as Bass Pro Ships, DirecTV, Neiman Marcus, Sirius XM, and Publishers Clearing House.
Georgy’s advice to marketers aiming to be tech savvy is start by being curious. Those who endeavor to learn to be techies need to embrace one key concept, Georgy says: Seek questions, not answers. “Often, we try to seed answers and wrap the technology around them,” he says. “What we do at Experian is outline the questions we wish we knew the answers to about customer behaviors and levels of engagement.”
But the one thing even technology can’t solve in the marketing suite, he says, are data silos that deliver the goods to marketers too late or not at all. “Technology can’t help here,” Georgy says. “The organization needs to commit to a new way of working that drives real-time engagement, not limits it.”
