Marketing Creativity: What it Looks Like in 2015
Marketing used to be a creative process, dominated by creative geniuses like Marshall Field, John Wanamaker, and Stanley Marcus; men who built great fortunes with their intuitive sense of what their customers wanted.
Marketing isn’t like that anymore. Analytics have replaced intuition – a less volatile, more dependable kind of creativity. Get the analytics right, and they will deliver accurate, actionable information about the thousands of customers you do business with but never actually meet.
Analytics is changing, too.
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, cited this trend when we talked with her the other day. “We’re seeing a shift in the direction of analytics,” she told us. “Companies are starting to offer analytics that are powerful and easy for marketers to use. They’re pushing things to the next level.”
If she’d added “affordable,” she’d have perfectly described three of the reasons why what we offer is different from other vendors in the analytics arena.
We’ve gotten the analytics right. The target lists (which customers to target, and what to offer them) we generate are based on each customer’s transaction data, not on segments, or surveys, or inferences from other data, such as click streams. And as we’ve shown time and time again, predictions based on what a customer has actually done are the most accurate way to know what individual products that individual customer will buy in the near future.
And what could be easier to use than a web-based application, with a friendly interface, that any individual marketer can use to create and deliver campaigns (without the back- up of an IT department or a team of data scientists)? And nobody who’s seriously interested in adding highly accurate customer analytics to their marketing toolbox has ever picked a lower cost vendor than us.