How Virgin used big data to inform its new content strategy
Richard Branson’s Virgin empire incorporates a broad range of
brands and companies that take in travel, TV, music and
spaceships.  All these disparate businesses have their own
websites, but the overall corporation is represented by  This
site has undergone a huge transformation in the past 10 years,
morphing from a simple web portal into a content-rich site that
aims to epitomise the Virgin brand experience.  At
Econsultancy’s JUMP conference last week, which formed part of
the Festival of Marketing, Virgin’s Bob Fear described how the
site was redesigned by the content team working hand-in-hand
with data scientists.  Fear’s team consists of journalists and
writers, so the thought of working with big data appeared
somewhat confounding at first.  However after working with an
external agency, Fear’s team was able to create a new content
strategy based on analysis of its audience behaviour.   The data
analysis formed the foundation of what we were do