In a company, the term “culture” is often defined by qualities such as an organization’s business values, overarching mission statement, operational style, working languages, technology and operating systems, personality traits and in-office habits. Basically I tend to think of a company’s culture as the delicate balance among those inexplicable qualities that make your employees do the things they do. It’s those traits that cannot always be written down on paper that often make employees and their company culture stand out amidst a crowd of “so-so” performers. And it’s often what keeps customers happy and coming back year and after.

Take, for example, a global footwear brand. This brand’s primary foothold may have been from brick-and-mortar stores around the U.S. But as consumers quickly ditch in-store shopping in favor of the speed, ease of use, convenience and massive array of product options made possible by online and mobile devices, a brand’s digital marketing culture matters, a lot. It can make all the difference in customer engagement and loyalty on one level. But most important, it can also very drastically impact actual sales figures and revenue across multiple channels. So let’s look at some of the prevailing digital “values” that could either help or hurt a brand’s bottom line.

The “other” dominates our attention. We spend our marketing dollars and resources in search of ways to “one-up” our competitors.

We see this a lot among brands. The marketplace is highly competitive these days. Consumer budgets are drastically lower, since the 2008 financial collapse. Attention spans and free time are often very limited. Consumers, in turn, demand much more from their experiences with brands, regardless of where these experiences occur and what devices they are using.

Because of these challenges, we often see brands looking to digital marketing to move the engagement and revenue needles in the right direction. But then they get stuck because their digital focus becomes all about showmanship and facing off in a tit-for-tat competition with others in their same space. What good will that approach do? Not much. It will only make your customers feel more frustrated, less appreciated and more unlikely to interact with your brand. If you can’t make every single interaction and experience customers have with your brand a positive, engaging and intuitive one—whether it’s in-store, online, mobile, social or email—you should expect to say goodbye to them relatively quickly.

We can no longer envision “big ideas” and creative marketing without the support of big data.

There once was a time when the “creative” process of branding and marketing was left solely to agencies and their teams of art directors, creative designers, copywriters and everyone else who spent a good portion of their days drawing and sketching out brand concepts and stories. On the other side of the proverbial “brand” table sat the numbers and analytics “geeks,” as they were often called. These teams would crunch numbers, run hundreds of equations, and compile long and arduous Excel^® sheets.

Well, that divisive line between creative and data is no longer existent. To be a brand that’s challenging the status quo, inspiring consumers to smile, laugh, cry and even debate what’s acceptable, as well as getting consumers to spend more time and more money with them, we have to use data to support those “big ideas.”

No two consumers will ever want an identical experience, so we continually test and learn.

A recent poll by Korn/Ferry among senior executives indicates that 53 percent of them believe their companies should allocate budget to explore new marketing channels through a “test-and-learn” approach, in order to remain competitive; but half of the respondents feel that their marketing departments do not receive enough budget to do so.

Can chief marketing officers transform the way they market by simply employing a test-and-learn philosophy? Well, yes and no. Let me explain. If a brand is simply going to try a bunch of random “tactics” without any real reason or purpose behind them, there won’t be much value in it. Just look at how many brands these days are jumping headfirst into the responsive-design game. They’re doing it because they are being told by either the C-level executive team or the board of directors that mobile is where they need to be. So they go after a quick fix and rush into responsive design without any real thought, strategy or testing behind it. That’s a big mistake.

On the other hand, the real value of a test-and-learn digital culture lies in being patient, spending the time to analyze all of the data available (CRM, online, mobile and social), and identify what’s working and what’s falling through the cracks. That allows you to formulate a very calculated and strategic hypothesis and then test against that, until you can create an experience—be it online or mobile or social—that’s as relevant, seamless, easy to use and engaging as possible.