Understanding Miscommunication Between Analysts and Marketers

Two households, both alike in dignity, in digital marketing do their strife. Analysts and marketers, like the infamous Capulet and Montague houses, have an ancient grudge going on. Marketers want to make data-based decisions through extensive market research, but to do this, they need reports to be prepared as quickly as possible, ideally within a day. In contrast, analysts want to be completely confident in the data and hate the rush.

However, as we all know, clear communication and timely collaboration between the company’s departments are crucial to the continued success of your brand. Poor workplace communication costs U.S. businesses an estimated $1.2 trillion each year, according to Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication report.  

A communication gap occurs when there is a disconnect between what is promised in marketing and what is delivered, leading to customer dissatisfaction. These challenges were amplified during the pandemic and persist today as hybrid work becomes a baseline expectation: as of June 2025, 27.9 % of all working days were still remote.

Let’s explore the common problems in communication between analysts and marketing teams, particularly regarding customer behavior, and gather the experts’ opinions on these challenges.

Introduction to Communication Gaps

Communication gaps between analysts and marketers are common in data-driven organizations. While both teams work toward shared business goals, they often operate with different priorities, tools, and languages, which can impact customer satisfaction scores. 

Marketers focus on speed, creativity, and campaign impact, whereas analysts emphasize accuracy, structure, and long-term insights. This misalignment can lead to misunderstandings, delays, and missed opportunities, especially when data expectations and deliverables don’t match.

These disconnects are rarely intentional; rather, they stem from differences in how each team defines success and interprets information. What seems like a clear request to a marketer may lack the precision an analyst needs to act, while an analyst’s technically accurate report might not answer the business question at hand. Over time, these mismatches can strain collaboration and impact the effectiveness of data-informed decisions.

The Roles and Realities of Analysts vs. Marketers

Though both analysts and marketers aim to drive business growth, they approach their work from fundamentally different angles. Understanding what each team values, how they operate, and where their pressures lie is the first step in bridging the communication gap. Let’s take a closer look at what defines each side.

Analyst's Side of the Force

So, let’s flip the script and examine the ins and outs of digital analysts. They work with data, but what exactly do they do?

Note! Depending on the company’s needs, the requirements for analysts can also change. However, usually, the main tasks of analysts include:

• Analysis of business requirements and setting up web analytics for business tasks.
• Analysis of the website’s structure and the platforms implemented.
• Design and development of metrics systems for collecting user behavior data on the website and in mobile applications.
• Build and maintain daily/weekly/monthly reporting and perform baseline analysis for supported areas.
• Synthesize data/research from multiple sources to find the right answers.
• Creating and improving data reporting, data visualization.
• Setting up services to send, receive, and analyze data, and checking the quality of data collected.
• Exploring new web analytics tools.
• Supporting business strategy by providing data-driven insights that inform decision-making.

You can continue to list the technical requirements for any specialist in this job profile, but the main thing remains unchanged. Any good analyst’s essential qualities include a mathematical mindset, calmness, attention to detail, and strong analytical skills. These people talk numbers, columns of numbers from data tables, and a little more SQL queries. 

Most often, they think about the data structure, object properties, metrics, and parameters. Staying up-to-date on market trends enables analysts to provide relevant and timely insights that support business objectives. Analysts typically don’t consider business questions and hypotheses.

Marketer's Side of the Force

On the other hand, marketers operate within the concepts of business results and sales, speaking the business language, not the data structure language. Marketers must both build and dismantle campaigns at speed—launching creatives, monitoring performance, then rapidly iterating when results dip.. Picture this, to promote the product with an advertising campaign, you need:

• Develop marketing strategies, be responsible for their implementation.
• Provide an analysis of the brand’s competitors in the market.
• Create marketing campaigns (design creatives, write promotional and sales copy to ensure it doesn’t come across as spam). For example, when marketing a fine dining restaurant, marketers must tailor their messaging and campaigns to highlight the elegant ambiance, high-quality food presentation, and attentive service that customers expect from a premium experience.
• Create landing pages and think through promotional activities.
• Email marketing.
• Find the growth zones and the risk zones.
• Hypothesis generation and testing.
• Identify and target potential customers to expand the company's reach and increase sales.

Start over. And again. Not to mention, all this happens in one calendar month. We won’t delve into detail on specific moments, such as targeted advertising, maintaining company profiles on social networks, developing landing pages, tracking marketing trends, and other related activities.

💡 Learn how analytics empowers marketers to break free from routine tasks and make smarter, data-driven decisions. Discover how to take complete control over your marketing in this article.

Dive deeper with this read

How to Leverage Data Analytics to Solve Marketing Problems

Using the Gap Model to Understand Team Miscommunication

The Gap Model, often used to analyze customer service issues, can also reveal where internal miscommunication and customer service gaps occur, especially between analysts and marketers. By identifying these gaps, teams can gain a deeper understanding of why breakdowns occur and where alignment is lacking.

What Is the Gap Model of Service Quality?

The Gap Model of Service Quality, often referred to as SERVQUAL, is a framework that identifies where misalignments occur between customer expectations and service delivery. Originally developed to analyze customer service problems, it outlines five key gaps that can apply to internal communication, too:

• Gap 1 – Knowledge Gap: A lack of understanding about what the other team needs or expects.
• Gap 2 – Policy Gap: Internal processes and tools that don’t support effective collaboration.
• Gap 3 – Delivery Gap: What one team delivers doesn’t match what the other team expected.
• Gap 4 – Communication Gap: Misalignment between what’s promised (or requested) and what’s communicated.
• Gap 5 – Customer Gap: The outcome gap, which is the difference between the expected results and what is received.

Examples of Communication Gap between Analysts and Marketing Teams

As you see, misunderstandings between such different professionals are inevitable. Limitations in understanding each other begin at the level of understanding the task. The higher the level of understanding of the task, the more likely it is to be completed quickly and correctly.

Let’s look at some examples of how the two teams interact and what steps can be taken to save the day:

1. The marketer doesn’t understand the structure of the data and its properties, as well as their relationship. It would be helpful if the analyst shared this knowledge with the marketer.
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2. An analyst counts numbers and prepares reports. They don’t think about the decisions, the reasons why the marketer wants the report. And if the analyst develops their business thinking and dives more into the peculiarities of marketing, they will be much more effective.
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3. It’s important to bear in mind that the marketer isn’t uncooperative, and the analyst doesn’t scoff. It’s just that these people are engaged in different activities and look at the reporting differently.
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4. Very often, the problem is that analysts consider themselves smarter than marketers, and even when anticipating the problem, they silence it. The task performer must ask questions, clarify, and try to avoid bottlenecks and conflicts. They should help the customer get what they want.
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5. The marketer, for their part, must deepen their knowledge in the data structure so that it’s easier to communicate with the analyst and set tasks for them.
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6. Typically, the marketer is tied to KPIs, while the analyst is often not. Therefore, marketers need everything to be ready for yesterday when there is no rush for analysts.
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7. A marketer cannot set a straightforward technical task once and for all, because when you have a question, you need a report to answer it. But when you get the answer, new questions arise. And it’s almost impossible to foresee it unless you try to create a wild, terrible, alien, monstrous report.
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8. If you don’t work with data and don’t combine it, it’s difficult to predict, and generally, imagine that you can combine data in different ways to answer the same question. For example, you need a report with a view by the marketing channel for new applications. And what channel should be assigned? The first user visit? The one from which the application was left? Do you need to look at how users who came from PPC in December converted to sales in March? What is the basis for combining this data?
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9. You need to talk more with your colleagues, clarify, study more about each other’s work, and establish simple human connections. After all, we are all people who work in the same company for the common good. Addressing the gaps in the Gap Model can improve customer satisfaction and enhance service quality, which is a principle that can also be applied to internal team dynamics.

If you don’t know where to start solving the problem of miscommunication between marketing and analytics teams, try the OWOX BI Smart Data. Focus on what matters. Automate data collection for analysts: 

• Eliminate the need for manual data cleaning and processing. 
• You’ll receive ready datasets in the clearest and most convenient structure. 
• Customer feedback surveys can help identify service gaps by directly asking customers about their experiences, providing actionable insights to improve collaboration and service quality.

Additionally, OWOX BI provides the easiest way for marketing specialists to gain a comprehensive overview of their marketing performance. Get ready-made marketing reports using the simple OWOX BI Report Builder interface. Find insights to attract customers, increase advertising efficiency, and reduce costs.

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What Experts Say About Bridging Team Communication Gaps

If your colleagues speak different languages, it’s logical that they need a translator. Unfortunately, Google Translate is not a help in this case. You’ll have to do it on your own. We think there are two key points here:

1. Respect each other.
2. Communicate with each other.

You cannot learn to understand colleagues from another team if all your communication is reduced to correspondence in Slack, etc. And 90% of messages are “it’s urgent, I need it yesterday, how much longer I need to wait, what else do you need!”

Of course, in pre-COVID times, it was possible to organize gatherings on Friday evening to discuss the work, the project, and the latest series from Netflix over a beer or two. But in entirely online conditions, not everything is lost. 

Arrange a master class, webinar, joint presentation, or cross-training. Of course, you won’t solve the problem at one time, but at least you’ll begin to move (lie down, sit, hug your pet) in the right direction. The idea is quite simple — to encourage people to communicate with one another.

💡Want to learn more about miscommunication in a digital world? Try listening to the HBR IdeaCast with Nick Morgan, a communications expert.

Let’s find out what the experts’ recommendations are on how to win over the miscommunication between your teams. The Gap Model of Service Quality helps businesses identify and close gaps between customer expectations and actual service delivery, which can also be applied directly to providing exceptional customer service.

Fix the Rust in Your Communication Pipes

Communication problems create rusty pipelines and rot the data flow within an organization. It's imperative to fix those.

Simo Ahava,
8-bit-sheep 

Miscommunication doesn’t just slow down projects,  it clogs the entire decision-making pipeline. Without proactive fixes, even the best tools or dashboards won’t deliver meaningful impact.

Bridging the Language Gap Between Analysts and Marketers

Absolutely! Analysts and marketers speak different languages. In my experience, it really needs to fall to the analyst to “speak marketing."
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Tim Wilson,
Search Discovery, Inc

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That comes down to doing a few things:

• Listening. It can be tempting to start problem-solving (What data can I pull to answer this question?) prematurely and not probe for the underlying business problem the marketer is looking to address.
• Not speaking analyst. Some education of the marketer is fine — what a metric means and its limitations in the data — but I’ve seen analysts slip into deep analytics terminology way too quickly when it’s not necessary. That can leave the marketer confused or, worse, feeling uncomfortable or put down (I don’t know what the analyst is talking about. Am I supposed to? He/she seems to think I should!).‍
• Never, never, NEVER telling yourself that stakeholders are stupid. That’s a fatal mistake — deciding that a relationship challenge is a matter of intelligence rather than an issue of communication.

Why Miscommunication Is Everyone’s Problem

I think it’s common for any team. I don’t think it’s necessary to mention it as an issue because miscommunication can appear in any kind of organization.

Laura Patterson,
President, VisionEdge Marketing, Inc.

We all need to work hard to make sure that we are listening and clarifying. Analysts need to be good at listening and asking questions. If analysts talk to someone in marketing, they need to remember that the majority of marketers aren’t as experienced with data or analytics or models as they are.

Some of the questions that should be asked are: 

• What kinds of decisions do you want to be able to make?
• Who do you want to share this information with?
• What do you use today? How well does it work?
• Why do you think you need a dashboard?

Questions like these help reduce miscommunication and ensure everyone is aligned. A good analyst must be able to ask those questions to ensure that what their team brings back is a working product.

Build Vocabulary, Build Understanding

Analysts don’t have a good marketing vocabulary, and marketers don’t have a good vocabulary in data science and data analytics.

Christopher Penn,
Chief Data Scientist and Co-founder ,Trust Insights

So, probably the most important and easiest thing to do is to get people together on Friday afternoons with their beverage of choice and get them talking to each other. Because you can become familiar enough with a discipline just by hearing people talk about it.

Additionally, people have commutes in many places. And it’s not a bad thing for your data scientists to listen to marketing podcasts or for your marketers to listen to data science podcasts, as this helps them start to understand the vocabulary and concepts, such as regression, logistic regression, and random forest.

It’s about getting everybody to understand the vocabulary of other disciplines to initiate meaningful interactions.

Make BI and Metrics Clear for Everyone‍

To overcome miscommunication issues, you should first make everyone around you understand marketing BI, explain the meaning of your metrics, and demonstrate how they can help.

Anjana Aggarwal,
Hubspot

IT analytics is pretty new, and not many people understand how it helps them. That’s the main reason for miscommunication. And you should remove this block.

You should talk to marketers around you to help them understand how they can utilize your data in their business. In my job, I always face this challenge. I just step up and talk to them.

Tips for Analysts to Communicate Effectively

Analysts should try their best to bridge the delivery gap, which starts with clear communication, shared understanding, and the courage to educate and take risks

Steen Rasmussen,
IIH Nordic

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• Communicate their knowledge in clear and understandable terms.
• Develop empathy for the people who will work with their numbers.
• Never fall into the data abyss without a hypothesis with which to pull yourself back out. Always remember why you perform your analyses.
• Translate the analysis results into actionable solutions for people. Make people understand how far data can take them. Educate your coworkers on how to apply data analysis in their work.
• Cultivate healthy self-criticism. Get your ideas to the desk and don’t be afraid to take a risk and fail. Proper training of employees is essential to bridge the Delivery Gap and ensure consistent service delivery, which is a key aspect of improving both customer and team satisfaction. The Delivery Gap highlights the difference between service standards and the actual delivery of the service. 

Real-World Success Stories: Bridging the Gap Between Analysts and Marketers

Building strong collaboration between analysts and marketers isn’t just theory—it’s being done successfully. Here are examples of companies improving alignment and results:

• Retail company workshops: Hosted cross-departmental sessions where analysts translated data into marketing language, resulting in more targeted and effective campaigns.
• SaaS company service gap analysis: Identified communication breakdowns and solved them by introducing shared dashboards, which improved visibility and project outcomes.
• OWOX BI reporting guide: Offers marketers a complete system—from data collection to ready-made dashboard templates—to streamline reporting and improve collaboration with data teams.

Best Practices for Improving Analyst–Marketer Collaboration

To bridge the communication gap between analysts and marketers, teams need to go beyond tools and focus on alignment, empathy, and consistent processes. 

Here are the key best practices:

• Communicate intent, not just requests: Marketers should explain the purpose behind their data needs. This helps analysts provide more relevant and actionable insights.
• Agree on definitions and KPIs: Align early on how key terms like "lead," "conversion," or "ROI" are defined to avoid conflicting interpretations.
• Establish regular feedback loops: Create a cadence for reviewing reports and refining processes to ensure the data supports marketing decisions effectively.
• Invest in mutual learning: Encourage analysts to understand marketing goals, and for marketers to learn basic data structures and reporting logic.
• Respect different working styles: Analysts focus on precision, while marketers focus on speed—acknowledging this difference fosters smoother collaboration and more realistic timelines.

Final Takeaways on Fixing the Miscommunication Loop

Misunderstandings among colleagues are quite common, but they have become even more significant due to the pandemic and the transition of many businesses to virtual workplaces. The lack of context and people's visual reaction doesn't help either. Miscommunication between teams, in turn, leads to both disruption of the day-to-day workflow and can affect large company projects.

Of course, it isn't always easy to remain calm, patient, and understanding with colleagues. We are all people, and everyone has hard, stressful days. However, you can avoid misunderstanding and resentment simply by clearly explaining what exactly you want to know for the task or KPIs, or, for example, how exactly you are going to use the data obtained.

Avoid guesswork in both the workplace and personal relationships. Pay special attention to both unprofitable marketing campaigns and your colleagues, uncovering patterns and valuable insights in your marketing performance, as well as collaboration between teams.

End Miscommunication with OWOX Data Marts (Community Edition)

When marketers and analysts speak different data languages, trust breaks down and decisions stall. OWOX Data Marts (Community Edition) turn scattered metrics and one-off SQL queries into a shared source of truth, so everyone works from the same definitions. Analysts define the logic once, while marketing teams explore, filter, and report on data confidently – without endless requests or “which number is right?” debates.

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