Jim Novo wrote: “The people that come to the party with relevant facts are the people who get to contribute to Strategy. That’s not to say that all Strategic decisions are fact-based, but these decisions begin with facts. So, if R & D and the CFO have relevant facts, they get to play. If Marketing does not have relevant facts, they don’t get to play. If Marketing s not involved in the Strategic decision making, they end up being “handed” problems rather than having a chance to solve them.” Strategy formulation, from the C-suite, ought to be informed with facts. Ideally, there’s a mix of aspiration and forethought involved in there. So resolved: Yes, analytics should play a role in[…]
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Verhoef and Leeflang (2009) come forward with some pretty compelling evidence about the state of marketing departments and their influence on strategy. I stopped reading JAM in 2009, so the original paper escaped my attention. The updated 2010 version in “New Theories” did capture it though. You can get the paper from either source. You can also read the following summary: There’s an issue with marketing departments themselves and their relationship with strategy at the C-suite. Its influence within an organization, on strategy, is waning as compared to R&D and the CFO. I thank Peter and Peter for writing the piece and will now shove into analytics. So, marketing has an issue. There’s good evidence to support that assertion. I’m[…]
The Marketing Science conference was really quite inspiring and informative. The conference generally followed this formula: I spent much of time alternating between Rooms 2, 14, and 25 – so I can only comment on 1/12th of the conference. So I’m not representing the diversity of the conference. A lot was said. I’m saying what I saw. (Preemptive apology aside to all those who spoke that I’m ignorant of, okay?) Opinion mining and sentiment analysis brought out the most flood of insults. Though, image macros were sorely lacking, it really did seem like insults were being thrown. The presenter would put forward a model and test it. Most of them are engaged in creating predictive models. It’s what they do.[…]
SOCIAL MEDIA DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!! Do you remember Morbo from Futurama? Yes. Well, I certainly do channel my inner Morbo periodically, especially around the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference time of year. This the fourth time I’ve tried writing this post – and not make it sound like I really am being Morbo. Here goes. The conference is next week and I’ll be in room 14 – soaking up all the papers at this curious nexus of marketing, social media, data mining, statistics, and modeling. Here’s a flavor: On Thursday, Sabris and Grewal are presenting: “A Blog-eat-Blog World: A Multivariate Poison Process Model of Competitive Performance Implications of User Generated Content”. And of course, I’ll suffer at 4:35 when[…]
Error happens on both sides in sentiment analysis / opinion mining. Assume you wanted to understand, quantitatively, if the books published by Penguin are better received/perceived by customers than say, DoubleDay. One way to crack that problem would be to go to Amazon.com and mine the opinions. It stands to reason that books published by one company would receive a higher weighted average star rating, wouldn’t they? But what if that was inadequate, and you wanted to understand the general mood and tone of what was being actually written – presumably so you could learn and adjust? What then? Assume extraction and a well-formatted file. In other words, assume a dataset. Consider two machines, m and n, that operates on[…]
London was certainly an adventure and a lot was learned. It was a whirlwind 20 hours. I spent a lot of time listening at eMetrics. There was a very large contingent of search and email marketers there – looking to see what this social media thing was all about. The panels on that topic were geared for that audience and it was particularly interesting to hear how others are explaining the opportunities in social media. I can’t/won’t share the details of private discussions that happened over the course of the day and next night. I spent a lot time talking at eMetrics. I went to London with Three Calls To Action of the Audience: 1. Join the WAA’s European Research[…]
I’ll be in London next week for a whirlwind 46 hours, coming for eMetrics and staying for the company. I’m looking forward to talking to Lovett to carry on where we left off two weeks ago. I’ll be talking more about Villanueva and linking in Earned Media Value (EMV), as well as talking about the differentiation in the definition. I’d like to meet up with Andy Lepki who does the analytics over at The Guardian. There are a few tweeple on the list. If you’re at eMetrics London too, don’t be a stranger. I don’t know nearly enough of you. I took in the British Election coverage on BBC World – garnering scorn for how much of it took up[…]
John Lovett and Jeremiah Owyang has written (with others) a white paper on Social Marketing Analytics. I’ll be referencing the report throughout this posting, so go check it out. This response is divided into three parts. It starts with a ‘I see where you’re coming from’, then ‘a few questions and inquiries’ and then ‘a few caveats and ways I’d improve it’. First, I see where John is coming from. John states, clearly, that “The objectives and metrics defined….in this report are a starting point for the infrastructure of social media measurement.” (p. 6). The whole document then goes into a very transparent goal alignment strategy – where four business objectives are lined out based on a goal, then KPI’s[…]
For Syncapse, eMetrics Toronto was a success. This post is long, and divided into three parts: a summary, a response to Glinski, and then a few thoughts about the next eMetrics summit to come to Toronto. The first presentation was Theresa Locklear of the National Hockey League. She demonstrated just how far that team had come in just two years. She presented real data – how it’s really presented – across multiple parts of the organization. I applaud that degree of transparency and I applaud her in particular for bringing her entire team. And her analytics team is simply brilliant. They’re well inspired and well informed. Solid. I’ll start with the Quant/Qual mix panel on Wednesday night. There was no[…]
eMetrics is coming Toronto next week. There’s still time to register, and I have a discount code if you want to attend. Tweet me at @cjpberry and I’ll shoot it on over. This will be my third eMetrics in three years, and as such, I’ll offer a few predictions. The panel I’m moderating on Wednesday will go off swimmingly. There will be some controversy as the panelists tussle over what’s really important in the qual/quant mix. There will be enough sparks to ignite some lively debate that evening. The whole Syncapse Measurement Science team will be there in force that night and on Thursday. They’re going to see just how other people present their material and they’ll have quite a[…]