Beauty, fashion and luxury marketers are as driven by data as any other brands, but the lack of unified metrics and challenges measuring the performance of influencer marketing campaigns are among the factors holding back progress in effectively using data.

Those are among conclusions of a report by Publicis Sapient and analytics firm Launchmetrics based on a survey of 1,000 marketing, communications and PR professionals in the U.S., Europe, Australia and China.

In the survey, 60% of marketers and 70% of data scientists said a unified view of marketing performance should be a top priority. But finding one metric to rule them all isn’t easy. While sales and customer conversions may be in the lead for that unifying metric, they aren’t the only candidates, and they’re not always easy to link back to marketing efforts in an industry that still does much or most of its business through brick-and-mortar retail.

Influencer marketing has become particularly important for beauty, fashion and luxury marketers, and measuring it is a particular challenge, with 40% of marketer respondents saying they rely on influencers themselves or brand partners to self-report performance.

'They're tracking everything'

A key reason for the gap is the relatively advanced development of e-commerce at all levels of the beauty, fashion and luxury industries in China, said Stephen Picard, associate managing director of Publicis Sapient. 

One advantage of dealing with data—and just doing business—in China is “for better or worse, you do everything on WeChat,” said Alison Levy, chief marketing officer of Launchmetrics. “You walk into a store, and they know who you are. You make the purchase there, whether you made it online or you look at their website or WeChat page or … they’re tracking everything.”

Obviously, that creates privacy issues that create pushback in the West, but it also raises the issue of how marketers can build and better analyze their first-party data, Levy said. “You shouldn’t be buying data, but you should figure out what tools you need to actually aggregate your own data in a better way.”

While influencers grading their own homework by reporting audience numbers may not be ideal, shifting to measurement and compensation strictly via affiliate or social commerce sales misses a key point too, Levy said.

“We’re starting to see brands want to create a new metric for customer lifetime value,” Levy said—one that applies to broader marketing activity but also to the “ambassador referral” value of influencers. The CLV measurement also balances return on investment measurement compared to simply looking at immediate sales, since the cost of acquiring a customer is front-loaded toward the beginning while the value comes in repeat sales over the customer’s lifetime.

Another major factor to consider when building analytics capability and dashboards to report performance is the widespread democratization of who’s consuming the data and analytics, Picard said. Years ago, analytics, data science and market research people were the primary users of performance dashboards. Increasingly, he said, chief marketing officers and other brand marketers are the ones monitoring and making decisions directly from the data.

Getting to a unifying metric won’t be easy given that every department and every activity has different key performance indicators, Levy said. Still, some marketers are doing better than others—particularly ones in Asia.

“The main takeaway we see is the discrepancy between the East and the West,” Picard said. “In both e-commerce and digital analytics, you see the East going faster and faster. And the gap is pretty clear. When you interview CMOs, you see the level of maturity is different, which I see as a huge opportunity for the West.”