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| Who’s Driving the Bus? - Response to a reader’s question |
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| Posted on 08/04/2008 by
Ken Howes |
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Recently, I received a comment on a previous blog post entitled “Who’s Driving the Bus?”. The reader asked a question I am often asked about where to begin when developing a segmentation. Do I start with the data or the business objectives? I hope my response is helpful and please feel free to send along any follow-up questions or thoughts.
Dear Reader,
Thanks so much for your recent comment on my blog post. You raise a very interesting question – and one I have heard more than once before.
More often than not, I find that the main reason why someone “wants the data to tell us” the solution is that they haven’t clearly thought through how they plan to use the segmentation. For if they had, they would clearly want to participate more actively in the solution in order to make sure the resulting clusters could support the kinds of marketing programs they envisioned.
If I fel... |
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| Are You Just Adding Hay To The Haystack? |
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| Posted on 07/07/2008 by
Don Ryan |
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I heard a comment recently about information intelligence that I got a kick out of. The comment was “When you are trying to find a needle in the haystack, pouring on more hay will not help.”
Sometimes I feel companies have fallen into this trap and rather than assemble just the data they need to study a problem and solve it, they gather as much data as they can in the hope that they will overwhelm the problem with sheer tonnage of information. Maybe this works from time to time, but I generally feel it is the wrong approach. Too much information can obfuscate a problem rather than illuminate it. Too much information can, in fact, distract the analyst or decision maker from seeing what is truly the key insight(s) and, as a result, paralyze the decision making process or, worse yet, lead to a bad decision. Furthermore, the “gather it (the data) and the answer will come” approach to... |
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| Behavioral Segmentation Leverages More of What You Know About Your Customers |
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| Posted on 06/09/2008 by
Don Ryan |
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Pavlov proved that you could condition animals to act a certain way, preferably a way you wanted them to, through behavioral re-enforcement. And ever since, marketers have been trying to copy the trick. That’s because, while opinions and attitudes matter, behavior matters more. Sure you want your customers and potential customers to think well of your brand and have positive intentions, but in the end you want them to actually do something that generates revenue for your business.
Maybe this is why the emerging field of behavioral economics has garnered so much attention in recent years, and particularly since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (posthumously) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Since then, books like Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational, written by other authors interested in personal behavior and decision making, have shot up the best seller lists and bec... |
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| The Analysts Are Coming! The Analysts Are Coming! |
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| Posted on 05/19/2008 by
Bill Duffy |
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Not since the Boston Tea party triggered a revolution over two hundred years ago has there been such a stir about another significant “revolutionary” event scheduled to take place on Boston’s waterfront on September 17, 2008.
Mark your calendars because iKnowtion will be hosting the first ever conference exclusively devoted to marketing analytics. The “Marketing Analytics Xchange” (MAX 08) will be held in Boston at the Long Wharf Marriott hotel right in the center of Boston’s historic waterfront district.
We are thrilled to be hosting this inaugural event, which will bring together an impressive array of speakers and attendees from leading companies, academia, and service providers to discuss the latest trends in marketing analytics and decision making.
Many of you (our frequent blog visitors) have been telling us for some time now that you are hungry for a greater dialogue ar... |
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| What’s Your Win-Rate? |
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| Posted on 05/05/2008 by
Mike McGuirk |
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What I really mean is, what is your failure-rate? This may sound like a bizarre metric, but successful innovators accept that all new ideas may not turn into 'wins.' In fact, they understand it’s a necessary cost of innovation.
Let’s apply this to the data-driven marketing area.
If you tell me that your company is nearly perfect when it comes to testing your myriad of marketing levers, I will argue that you are under leveraging your businesses test and learn function.
Why?
Because as good as we may be at projecting the needs and motivations of our customers, there is no replacement for putting the test in-market and letting the customers decide. Yes, we need to do all we can to properly inform our market tests, but some level of uncertainty is a reality and it should not impede progress and our need to learn and grow.
The point is, if you never fail, you’re not pushing ... |
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With so much change going on in the field of marketing, we felt that it was high time we try to stimulate
a dialog that focuses on the significant transition taking place within the marketing sciences area of many
companies.
Most experienced marketers agree that new tools and approaches are needed to help allocate and measure
marketing resources more effectively. If you're trying to tackle these kinds of issues in your company, join us
at Wise Guys - we'd like to hear from you.
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Rafael Bradley |
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Bill Duffy |
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Ken Howes |
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Mike McGuirk |
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Marcy Riordan |
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Don Ryan |
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Sreekanth Sampathkumaran |
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