Thinking
Most business decisions involve many levers. Most causal models get all but one of them wrong
Good business decisions don't mean looking at each lever in isolation. They mean pulling several together, and that is where standard causal machine learning falls apart.
Scoring customers for intent, not just behaviour
The same behaviour can create or destroy value depending on when, where and why it happens. Behavioural segmentation can't tell the difference.
Why a highly accurate model can still make terrible decisions
Two models. One predicts sales almost perfectly, yet gives disastrous business advice. The other is a terrible forecaster, yet gets the decision exactly right.
Every team's test is right but the answers still don't add up
A well-run A/B test answers the causal question for one lever, at one time. It still can't tell you who drove the quarter.
The big data fallacy
The bigger the dataset, the more likely we are to mistake correlation for causation. The good news is that causal thinking can be learned.
Who owns the intelligence budget?
Every commercial organisation invests in intelligence. They just don't call it that, and nobody owns it as a whole.
Everyone's claiming they drove the upside. Who's right?
Three teams each claim credit for a good quarter, and their claims add up to more than the gain. So who actually drove it?
The simple task your AI can't learn
Your sales model predicts almost to the dollar. It has no idea what happens if you cut the ad budget.
They don't like a cold night in Stoke
We mapped a full Premier League season to separate the football 'truths' that decide results from the ones pundits just repeat.
Go early or get left behind: four lessons for the agent economy
I've been digging into ChatGPT's new 'Agent mode' and have been thinking about what it may mean for brands, and for eCommerce specifically. While nascent it’s pretty clear that ‘Agent mode’ is here to stay, and from here user expectations for how it should feel are going to grow.
The Listening Gap: how brands forgot their customers, and why AI is about to call their bluff
Users are starting to bring AI agents into commerce that actually listen to them. Those agents have access to context, history, intent — everything brands would kill for but never bothered to earn. I see two paths ahead: Build for efficiency (make yourself machine-readable for AI agents) Build for experience (offer something worth choosing over delegation) The deadly middle ground? Pretending you're experiential while delivering commodity UX. The reckoning isn't coming. It's already here.
Webinar - Delivering commercial growth; keeping it simple with Kevin Styles, CEO at The Jamie Oliver Group
Webinar - Experimentation as a growth engine: 'If it disagrees with experiment, then it's wrong'
Zebra's approach - combining accuracy and precision
The Marketer’s Dilemma
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
5 things I’d tell my corporate self
I’ve been lucky enough to have had a fantastic corporate career; I’ve spent over 25 years in commercial roles with some of the biggest and most iconic brands, so it’s no great surprise that I’ve learnt a lot along the way.
3 simple steps to combining Media Mix Modeling (MMM) with Incrementality Testing to unlock cost effective growth
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Kush Shah gives his insights in how he leads brands to marketing success by combining Media Mix Modeling (MMM) with incrementality testing to create effective and measurable marketing campaigns.
Top 3 reasons why operating model changes fail
Having a clearly defined target operating model (TOM) can be a critical component within an organisation's transformation journey. But defining a TOM, and changing it, is often fraught with complexity and friction.
Why everyone should hire an entrepreneur
In a corporate world that’s often cautious about unconventional paths, entrepreneurs can be overlooked in the recruitment process or seen as risky hires. At Zebra, we think this is a big mistake.
Has ‘trading’ become a dirty word?
On a macro level, business is a pretty simple process, isn’t it? Money comes in, you have bills to pay, and what’s left is your bottom-line profit. Of course, you know this — it’s business 101. But somewhere along the line, ‘trading’ seems to have become a dirty word. Unsexy at best, and a dying discipline as businesses grow.
Top 5 mistakes to avoid when in-housing digital
Bringing digital skills in-house is often the goal of any business that relies on digital for a significant amount of revenue. But some ways of going about it are more successful than others...
Experimentation is the Greatest Science
Why you should introduce experimentation in to your business
The rise of the Generalist
Its a conversation we have with many clients. The truth is that delivering commercial growth in a digital world seems to become ever more reliant on technical specialists – CX, UX, paid channels, SEO, social, hypotheses and modelling, optimisation, CRM, testing, and increasingly AI… The list seems endless and the MD/CEO confusion understandable. Some of the very biggest organisations can afford to contemplate in housing everything they need. But most leaders can’t, or don’t want to. So how do they balance the conundrum?
88 miles an hour, Marty!
The role of silos in the failure of big projects, and what you can do to mitigate against it
Build or Buy? Criteria to help leaders make technology choices
As organisations have improved their internal engineering capabilities, the choice of how to best approach technology choices has become less clear cut.
The problem with business cases (and a better way to make decisions)
How are big projects decided on in your business?
Mind the skills gap
How organisations can effectively assess capability to build better teams
2023 in Review - and what's in store for 2024?
Stay ahead with our expert analysis and strategic insights. From market trends to operational excellence, discover how leading businesses are driving sustainable growth in today's competitive landscape.