If you have ever worked inside an organization where the marketing team is measuring one thing, the sales team is measuring something else entirely, and nobody is talking to each other about what any of it means, you already understand the problem that Steve Jackson set out to solve in Cult of Analytics.
Data is not the issue. Most businesses today are drowning in it. The real problem is that data gets trapped inside departments, interpreted through narrow lenses, and rarely translated into the kind of shared understanding that actually moves an organization forward. Jackson’s answer to this is the hub-and-spoke method, and once you understand it, it is hard to look at digital marketing analytics the same way again.
I say that as someone who has lived the cost of siloed information, not just in business, but in the world I have spent the last 16 years navigating as a caregiver, a Registered Behavior Technician, and the founder of Local Tenacity.
What the Hub-and-Spoke Method Actually Is
Jackson introduces the hub-and-spoke model in Section 1.5 of Chapter One as a structural approach to breaking down organizational silos and getting information flowing across departments. The concept is borrowed from logistics and transportation, where a central hub connects to multiple spokes radiating outward. In an analytics context, the hub is a centralized analytics function staffed by professionals who can interpret data and communicate it clearly to every part of the business. The spokes are the individual departments: marketing, sales, finance, operations, customer service, product development, and any other function that touches the customer or the business model.
The hub is not a gatekeeper. It is a translator and a connector. Analytics professionals sitting within the hub learn to speak the language of every spoke, so that insights do not die in a spreadsheet somewhere but actually reach the people who can act on them.
Jackson is clear that this model only works when it has genuine leadership buy-in. Without executive support, the hub never gets the authority or the resources it needs to function. Departments default back to protecting their own data, and the silos rebuild themselves almost immediately. Leadership buy-in is not just a nice-to-have in Jackson’s framework; it is the foundation the entire structure rests on. When leaders visibly champion a culture of analytics and hold departments accountable for sharing and using data, the hub-and-spoke model can actually deliver on its promise.
The Silo Problem Is Not Just a Business Problem
When I first read Jackson’s description of organizational silos, I recognized it immediately. Not from a corporate org chart, but from the special needs ecosystem I have worked inside for over a decade.
Families raising autistic children are surrounded by professionals who all hold critical pieces of information: the BCBA tracking behavioral data, the speech therapist noting communication breakthroughs, the occupational therapist documenting sensory sensitivities, the school IEP team setting academic goals. Every one of those professionals is collecting data. Almost none of them are sharing it in a structured, actionable way. The result is that families become the reluctant hub by default, carrying information between spokes that were never designed to connect, doing coordination work that the system should be doing for them.
That gap is part of what Local Tenacity was built to address. The vision for Local Tenacity is to function as what I call the mycelium of the special needs ecosystem, the connective infrastructure underneath that allows resources, providers, families, and data to actually find each other. The Special Needs Resource Directory, the Autism Explorer platform, and the B2B SaaS system being built for clinics are all spokes in that larger hub. They only create real value when they talk to each other.
Reading Jackson’s framework gave me a vocabulary for something I had been building toward instinctively. The hub-and-spoke method is not just a marketing strategy. It is a philosophy about how information should move, and what becomes possible when it does.
Why Digital Marketing Campaigns Cannot Be Built in Isolation
Here is where the hub-and-spoke method gets personal for anyone who works in digital marketing.
When a campaign is being planned, it is easy to stay focused on the metrics your own team owns: impressions, click-through rates, cost per acquisition, conversion rates. Those numbers matter enormously. But a digital marketing campaign does not live and die inside the marketing department. It touches every part of the customer journey, and that journey runs through multiple departments whether marketers plan for it or not.
Consider what happens when those handoffs are not coordinated. A campaign drives a significant traffic spike to a product page. The operations team was not told, so inventory is not prepared. The customer service team was not briefed on the promotion messaging, so when inquiries come in, agents give inconsistent answers. The sales team, working from their own separate pipeline data, has no idea which leads came from the campaign and which came from other sources, so follow-up is generic instead of personalized.
Every one of those failures is a data failure as much as a communication failure. The information existed, but it never traveled.
I have made versions of this mistake myself. In the early stages of building Local Tenacity, I was creating content for Autism Explorer, building out the resource directory, and developing the framework for the clinic-facing SaaS platform largely in parallel, with each piece moving at its own pace and in its own lane. The content strategy was not consistently informing the directory development. The directory data was not shaping the content gaps I was trying to fill. And the clinical insights I was gathering through my RBT work were not being systematically fed back into either.
The result was a lot of effort that did not compound the way it should have. Jackson’s framework helped me see that clearly. When the hub is empty or underdeveloped, the spokes spin without producing the kind of momentum that builds something lasting.
The REAN Model and Setting Expectations for Shared Data
Chapter Two of Cult of Analytics introduces the REAN model, which stands for Reach, Engage, Activate, and Nurture. Jackson presents REAN as a framework for defining KPIs in a way that maps to the full customer lifecycle rather than isolating a single moment in the funnel.
This matters enormously for cross-departmental analytics because different departments naturally care about different stages of REAN.
Reach metrics, things like website visitors, impressions, and brand awareness, tend to live in the marketing department. Engage metrics, time on site, bounce rate, pages per session, are often the territory of content teams and web developers. Activate metrics, conversions, sign-ups, purchases, are shared between marketing and sales. Nurture metrics, email open rates, repeat purchase behavior, and lifetime customer value, belong to email marketing, customer success, and retention teams.
For Local Tenacity, REAN maps almost perfectly onto the three-layer structure of the business. Reach is the Autism Explorer blog, pulling in parents and caregivers through SEO-driven content and social media. Engage happens inside the resource directory, where visitors interact with provider listings and guides. Activate is the moment a family connects with a service provider or a clinic signs on to the SaaS platform. Nurture is the ongoing relationship that keeps families coming back and turns clinic partners into long-term advocates.
Without a framework like REAN tying those layers together, each one risks becoming its own silo. The blog does not know what the directory needs. The directory does not know what the SaaS platform is measuring. The hub exists to make sure those layers are in constant conversation with each other, and REAN gives everyone a shared map to navigate by.
What Sharing Results Actually Unlocks
Once a campaign runs, the data it produces is only as valuable as the conversations it starts. Jackson’s argument throughout is that action requires that results reach the people who are positioned to do something with them.
When analytics professionals share campaign performance broadly across the organization, several things happen that would not happen otherwise.
Finance gains visibility into which acquisition channels are producing customers with the highest lifetime value, not just the lowest cost per click. That distinction matters enormously when budget allocation decisions are being made for the next quarter.
Operations and product teams gain early warning signals. A high bounce rate on a specific product page is not just a marketing problem. It may indicate a UX issue, a pricing mismatch, or a gap between what the ad promised and what the page delivered. When that data reaches the product team, it becomes a development priority.
Customer service gains context that makes the entire support experience better. Knowing that a campaign drove a specific audience segment with a specific set of expectations allows service teams to prepare tailored responses, reduce resolution time, and improve satisfaction scores.
Leadership gains the kind of integrated view that makes strategic decisions possible. When analytics data from across all the spokes flows back through the hub and gets synthesized into a coherent organizational picture, executives can see patterns that no single department’s dashboard would reveal.
For a business like Local Tenacity, this principle extends beyond internal departments into the broader ecosystem. When the resource directory data shows that families in a particular state are searching for crisis support services far more than any other category, that is not just a content signal for Autism Explorer. It is a product development signal for the SaaS platform. It is a partnership signal for outreach to ABA clinics in that region. It is a funding narrative signal for impact investors who need to see demonstrated community need. One data point, shared across every spoke, becomes actionable in five different directions simultaneously.
That is the compounding power Jackson is pointing toward. And it is exactly the kind of infrastructure Local Tenacity is being built to create, not just for its own internal operations but for every family and provider it serves.
The Culture Behind the Method
The hub-and-spoke method only works inside an organization that genuinely believes data belongs to everyone and that the job of analytics is to serve the whole business, not just the department that collected the numbers.
That culture has to be built intentionally. It starts with leadership modeling the behavior, asking cross-departmental questions in meetings, holding teams accountable for sharing insights, and investing in the hub with real resources and real authority. It continues with analytics professionals who see themselves as communicators and facilitators, not just analysts. And it deepens over time as departments experience firsthand what it feels like to have data that is actually useful because it was designed with their needs in mind from the start.
Building Local Tenacity has taught me that the same is true at the ecosystem level. When families have access to connected, transparent data about the resources available to them, when clinics can see outcome patterns across their entire caseload instead of one client at a time, when advocacy organizations can point to real numbers instead of anecdotal evidence, the entire system gets smarter and more responsive. That is the vision. It is ambitious. But it starts with the same foundational principle Jackson outlines: put the right information in front of the right people, and then get out of the way and let them act.
For anyone working in digital marketing, the takeaway is both humbling and energizing. The campaigns we build do not belong to us alone. They ripple out across the entire organization and the entire customer journey. When we plan them with that reality in mind, share what we learn openly, and use a framework like REAN to speak a language every department can understand, we stop being a marketing function and start being the connective tissue that helps the whole business move smarter and faster together.
That is what a culture of analytics actually looks like in practice. And it is exactly what Jackson is asking organizations to build.
References
Jackson, S. (2009). Cult of Analytics: Driving online marketing strategies using web analytics. Routledge.
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