iKnowtion Blog

What's New in Automotive Marketing? The Increasing Use of Non-Cash Marketing Offers

Each day I look forward to going through my mail, not email but the old fashioned kind I get in my mailbox at home and work. It's probably an occupational hazard with me, where I just have to understand why Company A sent me offer B, and why Company C thought I'd respond to offer D. One tren...

Engagement Analytics: Can You Turn Customer Interaction Data Into Business Intelligence?

In a never ending search to identify opportunities for competitive advantage, companies are shifting their focus towards creating a better customer experience - and engagement analytics can help. According to a recent
Based on the experience with our clients, we...

Prevent Customer Churn - Ways to Save Your Revenue

Customer churn is like a leaking faucet that, if left unchecked it can erode the foundation of your business. So getting a handle on what's causing it and what can be done to fix it is critical, especially in highly competitive marketing environments.

Companies often rely on c...

Reporting On a Report From the Executive Suite

Recently, I hosted a panel discussion at the annual DMA conference in Boston. The topic was Customer Intelligence in the Corner Suite -- How Senior Marketing Executives Are Making Real Time Decisions. With me were three highly expe...

Linking Your Market Segmentation to Your Customer Base

There is little debate that segmentation is a very useful tool for marketers. As I've written before, I am a "Segmentationist" and ardently encourage my clients to use segmentation to improve their marketing activities and spending priorities.

However, a sign...

Preventing Biases in Analytic Decision Making

The June issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a good article on how to avoid biases in decision making. Right from the opening paragraph, the authors (including Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman - the godfather of behavioral economics) point o...

Customer LifeTime Value, A Critical Metric for Business Success

Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) is one of the most useful metrics to maintain on your customers because it provides the best indicator of where your business is centered, who is worth investing in, and what the potential return on your investment might be.

That being said, a go...

Using Social Media to Build Your Business

Join iKnowtion Senior Partner, Don Ryan, along with Constant Contact CMO and 2011 NEDMA Direct Marketer of the Year, Nancie Freitas, for a Webinar entitled, SunTrust Bank, entitled Customer intelligence is the new catchphrase being used when discussing the old topic of "using data to stay close to your customers." And I like the ring of it, because what you can do to stay close to yo...

Solving the Issue of Cross-Channel Revenue Attribution
Recently, I participated in a dialogue with other members of the Forrester Customer Intelligence Community dealing with cross-channel revenue attribution. Although the original question had to do with what software tools ar...

Webinar "What's next for Customer Intelligence in 2011?"
Find out during this complimentary webinar when How We Decide by Jonathan Lehrer. It is essentially the reciprocal of Malco...

Are Your Analytic Tools Deceiving You?
I recently came across an old issue of Wired Magazine which contained the article, Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street. It describes the rise and fall of a model that was u...

Analytics Is Not Enough
A number of popular business books have been written recently about the power of analytics to improve business performance, including
Data integrity promotes customer analysis, and leveraging your c...

"Using Marketing Mix Modeling to Manage Your Marketing Spend" to be presented at DMA09
iKnowtion Analytic Director, Rafael Bradley, and Constant Contact CMO, Nancie G. Freitas, will co-present "Using Marketin...

Why Price Elasticities Matter to Marketers Today
Part I of a Series

Many of us took an Economics course in school. There we learned about price elasticities. In this and another blog, I revisit our college days, reconsider the idea of a price elasticity and examine why it matters today more than ever to marketers.

Tod...

How to Identify Pockets of Marketing Opportunity within Your Customer Base
Nearly every marketing professional has been faced with the challenge of breaking down a broad population into meaningful segments. The purpose of that exercise may be to identify opportunities to improve a marketing campaign, offer relevant products to consumers, or identify higher-potential target...

Financial Services Companies are Rethinking Marketing Strategies
Recently iKnowtion Senior Partner, Don Ryan, was interviewed by BtoB Magazine, the Magazine for Marketing Strategists. In the article, "Unta...

An Untapped Opportunity for Gaining Customer Insight
Marketing analytics professionals are certainly aware that the strength of their analyses and the accuracy of their predictions are linked to the quality of the input data.

Fortunately, businesses that want to compete with analytics have invested heavily in new information technology ...

What More Can Web Data Tell Us?
The web is giving us a greater opportunity to see how consumers behave - how they interact with a brand, what they're interested in, what captures their attention, and how they like to shop. Clearly, consumers who visit a company's website frequently are engaged with the brand. This fact alone can t...

Using Marketing Dashboards for Fact-based Decision Making & Accountability
I recently read a New York Times article, "1,000 Points of Data," which extols the benefits of a comprehensive database of key national indicators. The main point was that to provide greater account...

Using Marketing Analytics to Improve Results During a Recession
A new study* on the use of analytics asserts that retailers are increasingly looking to leverage their stockpiles of customer information as a way to gain competitive advantage. As study author Dr. Thomas H. Davenp...

A Marketing Analytics Resolution for the New Year!
What New Year's resolutions are you making this holiday season? I have my usual list of personal improvement promises and maybe you do too. On a professional note though, one suggestion I'd like to pass along is that, if you don't do so already, consider using an analytic sample in your test and lea...

iKnowtion in the News
Recently, DM News devoted a column to marketing tactics that were likely to be most effective at inspiring consumers to shop and spend money this past holiday season. In that column Don Ryan, our Senior Partner, provid...

MORE(TM) Retailers Can Succeed in 2009
As we move into 2009, retailers are going to need a new strategy for retaining their customers, given the current state of the economy. A strategy that should really be considered is around pricing incentives (i.e. discounts). On one hand, incentives will be needed to keep customers shopping and, on...

Heard On the Streets: Insights on Outsourcing from MAX08
Our marketing analytics forum, MAX08, was chock full of lively discussions on the issues, challenges, and opportunities facing today's data-driven marketers. What a treat it was to "flock together" with these "birds of a feather," who ...

Virtual Reality
Yesterday, I gave a presentation on segmentation as part of the DMA's Virtual Seminar series and was struck by a couple of things. First of all, a large and diverse group of companies signed up for the event, which sh...

Consumer Engagement as Leading Indicator
At our recent MAX08 forum (http://www.iknowtion.com/max08highlights), there was a very lively and informative discussion dealing with social media, online communities, and the analytics to measure them. Our panelists agreed that traditional market research with an all too frequent emphasis on the we...

Marketing Analytics Exchange, MAX08 - Big Success!
MAX08, our inaugural marketing analytics forum, was a big success with a sold-out crowd of over 100 participants from more than 30 companies.

We'd like to thank everyone who attended, especially those who came from out of state, and extend a special thanks to our speakers, moder...

Marketing Analytics Q&A with Dr. Thomas H. Davenport
As we gear up for our big event next week, the Marketing Analytics Xchange (MAX08), we thought it would be fitting to conduct a Q&A with the event's keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas H. Davenport, to give you all a sense of what the main theme will be. Dr. Davenport is the President's Distinguished Pr...

Marketing Segmentation Answer - Response to a Reader's Question
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 ...

Assessing the Value of Customer Data - Are You Just Adding Hay To The Haystack?
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 t...

Behavioral Segmentation Leverages More of What You Know About Your Customers
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 cu...

The Analysts Are Coming! The Analysts Are Coming!
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 f...

Marketing Strategies - What's Your Win-Rate?
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.
...

Everyone Likes Validation ... of their Marketing Models!
Validation of behavioral models is an interesting topic for marketing scientists. For the rest of our colleagues, it probably rates up there with the joke about a lawyer, an engineer, and an econometrician. (If you don't know that joke, ask me sometime.)

Roughly, model validation is c...

Marketing Strategies - Who's Driving the Bus?
Statistical models are invaluable tools for marketing. But we need to keep in mind that models are only as good as the marketing input that goes into developing them. Without it, even the most statistically robust models are doomed to failure.

Let's take cluster analysis as an example...

Marketing Insights - Change is the Only Constant
In his book "Marketing Insights from A to Z" Kotler said "instead of seeing a customer in every individual, we must see the individual in every customer." He used this concept to: • Emphasize the shift in marketing thinking from "maximizing the value of every transaction to maximizing the value...

Lift Modeling - Survival of the Fittest?
Last November, I posted a blog entry (Show Me the Lift - November 14, 2007) introducing lift modeling as a statistical technique well suited for answering the age-old question of who to market to in order to maximize incremental sales.

So here's my follow-up for those of you who live ...

Why Bad Things Happen To Good Marketers
I've been fortunate enough to have worked with a wide range of companies and not-for-profits over my career. For the most part, I'd say that my clients, the majority of whom have been marketing decision makers, have been smart, dedicated, hard-working, and focused on their goals. But while their int...

Marketing Metrics - How We Doin'?
About fifteen years ago I did some work for a relatively prominent regional bank and had the opportunity to spend time with the EVP of deposit products. While we sat in his well-appointed office, he rattled off a slew of monthly statistics from a packet of reports that hit his desk on a regular basi...

Marketing Strategies - The Value of Information
A long time ago, in my graduate school days, I was taught that the value of information is the cost of making the wrong decision. Marketers make important decisions all the time and so they are particularly interested in information, not just data. Therefore, it is the job of the analyst to make sur...

Behavior Based Television Advertising - The Next Big Thing?
Okay - If there's one thing we can all relate to, it's how we each uniquely consume, experience and interact with that most treasured of household appliances, our television set. Who doesn't set aside at least some part of each day either alone or with family and friends relaxing in our very own fro...

Marketing Strategies - Moving the Needle
As the new year approaches, I find myself thinking about several conversations I've had during 2007 with marketing managers who, on the one hand, say they really want to "move the needle" on business performance, but who, on the other hand, are reluctant to deviate too much from what they are doing ...

A Vote for the Patron Saint of Database Marketing
At the recent NCDM conference on database marketing in Las Vegas, I introduced my talk on customer segmentation by discussing the famous 20/80 rule. Everyone in the room had heard of it and knew what it meant. I also referred to it as Pareto's Law, a term many also knew.

But when I as...

NCDM Conference - "What Happens in Vegas?"
I'm on my way home from attending the NCDM conference in Las Vegas and I'm sure to be chastised for sharing some conference observations, after all, "What happens in Vegas, supposedly Stays in Vegas." Let's hope the State of Nevada PR police don't find out.

After studying the conferen...

Test & Learn Strategies - The Surest Test of Discipline is its Absence!
Profound words from Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross - and seemingly appropriate for some thoughts I've had lately on the state of "Test and Learn" business practices in many companies we've encountered.

Consider the following scenario....

A senior market...

Who You Gonna Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?
In the prelude to the famous mirror scene in the Marx Brothers' movie Duck Soup, Chico, disguised as Groucho, defends himself from Mrs. Teasdale's accusation that she saw him (meaning Groucho) leave her room by saying, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" This line is also apropos of the di...

Marketing Strategies - Inquisitive By Nature
Human beings have long been considered extremely inquisitive creatures. Why do scientists, investigators and business analysts pursue these careers? Because they have a strong desire, some bordering on obsession, to search for answers, especially when the answer is well concealed and hard to find. H...

Show Me the Lift - Lift Modeling Explained
While the science of marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, we have been trying to solve the same problem for many years. That is, how to ensure that marketing investment is producing incremental results. It's the basic premise that marketing managers gravitate to and finance managers ques...

I am a Segmentationist!
I'm not a guy who wears his religion on his sleeve, but, on the other hand, I'm not afraid to proclaim that I am a segmentationist. As in customer segmentation. That's because I think segmentation is one of the critical aspects of what we, as data-driven marketing analysts, do to help companies unde...

Power's On....Let's Talk About the Math Behind the Marketing!
It's our inaugural BLOG posting - and so on this special occasion (at least for us), I thought it appropriate to reflect on this comment from an early marketing practitioner and one of the most influential people of her time:

"A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagina...