I thought it’d be helpful to share a couple of word clouds to better understand marketing. Word clouds are sometimes looked down upon by academics but they can be very simple visual ways to summarize text. Are they deep analysis, no, but they are a fun place to start.
Word Clouds To Better Understand Marketing: Wikipedia
The first is based upon the Wikipedia page on Marketing. While Wikipedia is frowned upon by many scholars I think it is very informative. Clearly everything on Wikipedia isn’t necessarily “true”. Still, if you believe in the Wisdom of Crowds — and I think it applies reasonably often and probably here — then Wikipedia probably isn’t too far off accuracy. Wikipedia is also very useful for understanding consensus definitions. As marketing academics we can define marketing all we like but what do “normal” people generally think marketing involves.
The word cloud of the Wikipedia marketing page helps illustrate this. It is very easy to do using the WikipediaData command in Mathematica. To be honest, it is stunning how easy it is (see Joyce 2015). Below is the result; unsurprisingly Marketing dominates but research also features quite heavily.
A Marketing Metrics Word Cloud
After this, I decided to do a word cloud based upon a very popular metrics book (ours — it made getting an electronic copy much easier. This was the third edition). The word cloud produced was as follows:
Sales and Price seem to be as important as marketing. Furthermore, customer and customers are critical. There is a decent amount of overlap with the Wikipedia wordcloud. It might not be the most surprising thing in the world but at least our book seems to fit well with what people think of as marketing.
For more on Marketing Metrics see a free chapter here.
Read: Alan Joyce (2015) New in the Wolfram Language: WikipediaData, March 20, 2015, https://blog.wolfram.com/2015/03/20/new-in-the-wolfram-language-wikipediadata/ for more on the WikipediaData function in Mathematica.