NCDM Day 1 Roundup

It’s pretty cold in Miami – coat weather. Not quite freezing like the rest of you. But cold.

A few points from day 1:

• I’m impressed with Jeff Robertson of Delta. It’s the first time I’ve heard a loyalty points analyst use customer centric language, doing right by people, and meaning it. His reported actions, and the manner in which he reached conclusions, is truly customer centric. His mouth was aligned with his hands and aligned with his heart. A very smart, very brilliant presentation in applied analytics. No cynicism. Loved it.

• Language. Much of the rhetoric is very similar to what you’ll hear at an eMetrics conference. Some of the words are a little bit different. For instance, instead of ‘KPI’, they use the term ‘lighthouse metric’. Precision means accuracy, or, at least, is used in a manner that means accuracy. ‘Convenient reasoning’ is a proxy for ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘proof seeking’. Loyalty isn’t the same as affinity or satisfaction – loyalty means loyal behavior. The language is always off just a little bit.

• Unawareness of innovators dilemma among loyalty paradigmers.

• Obsession with the term ‘unmet needs’, and this meshing of that term with ‘insight’.

• Most excitingly: the definition of the word ‘insight’. I’ve been on about this a lot as of late. One gentleman used a definition which was just close enough to serial innovation rhetoric to resonate. In analytics terms, an insight is defined as being an original finding, causing an alternative decision path to be taken that is feasible, and whose execution results in an increase in profit. This definition of an insight happens to coincide with what we consider to be an ‘interesting problem’ in the marketing science sphere. It plugs nicely.

Day 2 is underway. Off to troll somebody else.