Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight.

Excuse my remixing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but doesn’t it feel that way when staring at a dashboard sometimes.

We have so much data – and frankly, our competitors probably have a lot of the same data – but can we turn those numbers into real insights to better serve a customer?

Here’s one way to do it, that I read in a recent podcast guest application, but you have to close your laptop first – “Walk the market.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Katherine Melchior Ray, faculty member and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business [https://haas.berkeley.edu/], and author of the book ‘Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to build brand value across cultures’ [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brand-global-adapt-local-katherine-melchior-ray/1146174119].

Berkeley Haas ranked No. 8 among U.S. business schools in the 2025 Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.

During her career, Ray managed teams up to 150 and reported to CEOs in Germany, France, Japan, and the US.

Lessons from the things she made

• Nurture your curiosity
• History is not just for school
• Prioritize relationships
• Walk the market
• Infuse a founder’s values into the brand
• Combine audacious risk taking with care

Our next event

Join us for ‘AI Executive Lab: Transform billable hours into scalable AI-powered products’ on September 10th at 2 pm EDT. Register here [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec050].

Discussed in this episode

Customer Experience: Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment (podcast episode #145) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/customer]

An Effective Value Proposition: What it is, why it is so important to business and marketing success, and how to use it [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/value-proposition-business-marketing%20success]

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/free digital marketing course.

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