In many ways Cristina Hanganu, Director of Communications at Lidl Romania, was the inspiration for this month’s issue. I was privileged to lead a dashboard development workshop with her team in Bucharest, Romania, last month, and was blown away by the breadth and depth of their approach to metrics.
It’s hardly surprising, given the nature of Lidl. In case you’re not familiar with the brand, Lidl is a Germany-based grocery store conglomerate that has built it’s very profitable business model around metrics. By measuring everything that happens inside a store and maximizing efficiency, it can operate more stores with fewer employees and less waste.
So it wasn’t entirely a shock when they decided to engage me to help do the same thing for their communications process. What was a shock was the extent of the data to which they had access.
Normally, when I ask a client if he or she can get access to data from sales or operations or marketing the standard response is: “We don’t have access to that data.” But at the Lidl meeting, I would, in a flight of fancy, throw out some outlandish idea, about, say, correlating their CSR activities to store traffic. Invariably, they would announce, “We can do that!” It was truly one of the more refreshing and exciting workshops I’ve ever conducted.
And so congratulations to Cristina Hanganu our Measurement Maven of the Month. Many thanks to Ana Maria Diceanu (another measurement aficionado) at GMP PR for introducing us. ∞
