Bloomberg's information machine

In this month’s Fortune magazine Caroly Loomis writes an outstanding article about the company “Bloomberg” http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/). Bloomberg has grown over the last 25 years into one of the most successful and profitable information providers in any category. They are less a financial firm, than they are a very smart information provider with high loyalty amongst its user base. Bloomberg has perfected the game of mashing up publicly available information, proprietary content, and derived key metrics focused on improving professional investment decisions.

The success of Bloomberg can be explained by several core principles that haven’t changed much since its inception in 1982:

• Synthesize key financial data and metrics for investors and traders onto 2 screens
• Create proprietary and relevant content for an information obsessed investment community
• Make the usage of Bloomberg information a critical part of the daily routine of customers
• Constantly innovate with new functionalities
• Provide high touch services to customers to ensure ease-of-use and stickiness

These five principles could be the foundation of any marketing information or insight division, either within a marketing services firm or a big brand company: Synthesize, create, integrate, innovate, serve! No more, no less. Why don’t we see more information teams following these principles? It’s mainly due to a…

• Lack of Visionary Power. Most analysts are comfortably happy with their marginalized positions within an organization
• Lack of Ambition: Most analysts don’t want to change the world or become famous. Only the drive to make things happen is creating a space that allows for innovation
• Lack of Relevance: Most analysts still try to optimize a direct marketing campaign by 1% instead of figuring out how a brand should spend the overall marketing budget most efficiently

Bloomberg’s success story should inspire us to push our information and insight teams to an even higher ground. We are not about just providing information and insights, we are about changing marketing.