Ian Dobson
Customer Strategy and Analytics Expert
After 10 years with the Royal Marines Commandos, Ian graduated with a degree in Business Studies and Finance before qualifying as a chartered accountant and training as a business coach. Over the last twenty years Ian has held senior commercial and marketing roles and has worked as a consultant to some of the largest UK and global brands leading large multi-disciplinary change teams.
Ian’s approach to marketing is as an “engineer”; integrating data, analytics, process and technology to automate decision making within a customer focused strategy that delivers genuine personalization, allowing marketeers to focus on testing, continuous improvement and great content.
Continually introducing the latest advances in marketing, some of Ian’s innovations include:- Creating a ‘Customer Contact Optimization’ technique reducing marketing costs by 26% and increasing profit by 10% (RAC 2001)
- Developing a ‘Customer Lifecycle’ model that in six months delivered £7m incremental profit with a 2% reduction in churn (Sky Italia 2006)
- Implementing a multi-national Next Best Action solution delivering £8m profit in the first year (BSkyB 2007)
- Using customer data to ‘personalise’ online advertising improving advertising engagement by over 200% (British Gas 20012; Vodafone 2013)
- Created a retail integrated ‘Trading toolkit’ using internal customer & channel data with external market & eCommerce data to diagnose trading performance delivering 200% to 400% growth in targeted product categories (Argos 2016)
- Combined econometrics and sales attribution models within a “test and learn” program that delivering over £350m of revenue (Argos 2017)
Ian’s philosophy is that business success is based on four simple steps. 1. Know your customer and what they want, 2. Create a fair value exchange, 3. Make it easy for the customer and 4. Learn from every customer interaction.