Are “customer information hubs” something new, or just a new buzzword for an old concept. We think the term does signify a shift that is occurring in the way we manage customer information and how we use it across the enterprise.
Understanding pricing is fundamental to understanding customer behavior. Yet many databases fail to provide marketers useful pricing data.
What major country will see some of the fastest population growth between now and 2050? China? India? The United States?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article in which I introduced the concept of meta-research — the analysis of primary research studies that has become a common practice in fields such as medicine. The approach is designed to make sense of the often conflicting conclusions that individual studies often produce. Indeed, as the ... Read More
We look at the phenomenon of zig-zagging, in which more valuable customers tend to spend less with our brand over time.
Regression toward the mean is a phenomenon that we often fail to recognize, something we do at our peril, especially when using models in contexts for which they were not developed.
An introduction to meta-research and how it can help us cut through the noise we create in marketing.
One of the most persistent topics among marketers is identifying the “best customer.” We ask whether this quest is useful or even possible.
The Science of Play In graduate school, at the urging of one of my professors, I read the book, Homo Ludens, by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga. For those of you not familiar with it, Homo Ludens (“man the player”) offers a theory that culture and civilization are formed from our ability to play. ... Read More
Relational databases have become the norm in customer relationship marketing, although it was not so long ago that many marketers had to work with mainframe-based data structures or even “flat files” (of course, some marketers still use such systems, sometimes quite happily). In the 1990s, the relational database won the battle for the hearts, minds, ... Read More
In recent years, political strategists increasingly have used approaches and techniques that are remarkably similar to those in other forms of marketing. Direct mail and email campaigns have been around for a long time for candidates at all levels of political campaigns. Social media-based grassroots campaigns were credited as one of the key factors in ... Read More
Recently, I was on a round-table panel with several senior marketers on the topic of marketing mix modeling and planning. One of the questions we spent quite a bit of time discussing is the challenge associated with media/channel attribution in a social network setting, and the related issue of resource allocation across different vehicles and ... Read More
Retail marketers would do well to start thinking of “Most Valuable Customer” as a state or phase that a subset of customers will pass through rather than as simply being a discrete set of shoppers. Doing so will quickly shift the internal focus to ”how do we get more customers into this state and keep ... Read More
Price, Promotion, Product and Place have been among the traditional marketing instruments for decades. However, “four Ps” marketing has been criticized by professionals and academics in the direct marketing/database marketing and CRM space. These experts correctly point out that 4P conspicuously lacks any meaningful consideration of customers. In fact, many in the CRM industry dismiss ... Read More
RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) has been one of the most popular and important approaches for segmentation and target modeling in direct and database marketing for the past 50 years. There are many variations and extensions to the basic RFM. For example, we expect customers with longer tenure to have higher frequency and are likely ... Read More
