In this age of big data, big claims and big hopes about maximizing the value of data to create sales, marketing analytics plays a central role. Despite all the attention it receives, there are some enduring misconceptions about what marketing analytics can and cannot do. Here are four top “urban legends” about how marketing analytics… Read More
Most companies describe their “customers” as people who buy products and services from them. Distributors, however, have another kind of customer – the manufacturers they represent – to whom they must sell themselves – and their value as a distribution partner. Their manufacturer partners are true customers in every sense of the word. For a… Read More
The fashionable marketing metric today is Marketing Return on Investment (MROI), meaning simply how much revenue do you get for your marketing dollars. This is expressed as a ratio: you divide your total revenue (the top number, or numerator) by the total of all of your marketing costs (the bottom number, or denominator). In principle… Read More
Over the years I’ve discovered business is more fun when times are flush. But I’ve also learned a lot in times when customers are pinching pennies. What I’ve learned in past year may seem obvious at first – but if everyone was following these lessons, nobody would need us. 1. Take good care of the… Read More
There were a lot of “I told you so’s” going around our offices last week. One of our customers has really been leveraging their segmentations, with different messaging and different mail frequency to the various groups in their customer base. From this activity our customer generated some reports with concrete proof that their two middle… Read More
Mark and I have a friendly, long-standing disagreement about marketing pundit Al Ries. He thinks the guy is brilliant. I think he’s a big blowhard. But given Ries’s recent math bashing, I’m hoping Mark may be coming over to my side. In the May 4, 2009 edition of Advertising Age Ries claimed that “determining the… Read More