Thursday, May 29, 2014

How to Feed 'Good' Data to Your Marketing Database

A challenge in the Big Data era of myriad potential data feeds is to select inputs that are usable, useful and cost-effective for marketing ROI. Not all data is created equal! To that end, we'd like to pass along a recent MarketingProfs six-point questionnaire to help you score data candidates for integration into your central customer and prospect database. Half of the questions deal with the crucial need for a unique identifier on imported data (such as an e-mail address or phone number) so that new data can be matched to the existing marketing database. If the identifier doesn't exist, can it be created (appended, for example)? Next, consider the overlap between a data feed and the customers and prospects already in the database: If the goal is inexpensive integration of targetable info (behavioral, purchase and demographic attributes, or additional contact points, for example), high overlap is good. (For database growth, not so good, we would add.) Finally -- and this is the key issue to our mind -- you need to determine the potential financial benefit from new data in terms of increased revenue. That, of course, assumes a basic understanding of customers from existing data. For the full MarketingProfs data-scoring article, see http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2014/25212/is-your-data-any-good-six-questions-to-help-score-your-data-resources

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Is Digital Age Changing Consumer Research Rules?

Be cautious about using traditional market research to guide a major consumer product change. That's the warning from the new book Absolute Value by Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen. The authors take a Universal McCann study of consumer interest in the first iPhone as an object lesson in why research can miss the mark in predicting consumer behavior today: That study found that an iPhone-type product would be a hit in countries like India and Mexico but not in the United States, Germany and Japan. What went wrong? Why are consumers unreliable predictors of their own behavior? The problem, note the authors, is that traditional market research looks at prior preferences, beliefs and experiences, while future consumer buying decisions about a new product (one that involves more than tweaking an existing product) are affected by a mass of noisy, ever-changing inputs in today's digital age -- such as online user reviews, friend and expert opinions, price comparison tools, and emerging technologies or sources. If consumers are bad at predicting their own preferences, market "experts" are no better, the authors add, pointing out that many experts failed to predict the success of the telephone, television and Internet. Should marketers abandon market research? No, they should change focus, advise the authors. Instead of trying to predict long-term consumer preferences, researchers can go with the digital flow and track consumer trends and decisions on review sites, user forums and other social media -- so businesses can respond with better solutions. Simonson is a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Rosen is author of The Anatomy of Buzz. For more on their book Absolute Value, see the news release: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/itamar-simonson-emanuel-rosen-how-digital-age-rewriting-rule-book-consumer-behavior