Political books can be a bit predictable. The challenge is often that right-wing people criticize the left-wing or left-wing people criticize the right-wing. This means you know where it is going before the book even starts. Depending upon your views, some comments might resonate more with you than others but the comments aren’t at all…
Author: neilbendle
Neil is an Associate Professor Marketing at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He investigates the measurement of marketing performance, the accounting/marketing interface, and the impact of non-standard decision making in commercial and political markets.
Neil is the Chair of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board advisors. He is co-author of Marketing Metrics: The Manager’s Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance (3rd edition) Wharton School Press and is co-author of a cartoon book: Behavioural Economics for Kids.
The ROI Of Customers
I am pleased to report that we have a new paper in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. My coauthors — Paul Farris, Raj Venkatesan, and Andrew Petersen — and I looked at the challenge of assessing the ROI of customers. One problem we saw was that marketers were getting misleading ROIs (returns on investment) for…
Managing Across Business Disciplines
One of the big challenges of running an organization is managing across business disciplines. That is one of the many insights shared in Stephen Diorio and Chris Hummel’s book Revenue Operations. Managing Across Business Disciplines The book I wrote with Shane (Xin) Wang — The Customer Asset — looked at the problem of customer valuation….
How To Make The World Better
Sustainability is about not infringing upon the future while delivering for those here now. The good news is that there isn’t necessarily a conflict between the two. Just because people get richer (current generation) doesn’t necessarily mean they need to do more damage to the future generations. Progress can happen without stealing from the future….
Experts Need To Take Public Policy Interventions Seriously
Public policy recommendations are one way academics seek to influence the world. That said, I fear we often don’t give our recommendations much thought. They are tacked onto the end of papers to make the years of work done on the problem seem important enough to publish. This week, rather than look at a paper…
Denial, Doom, Or Informed Optimism
Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World In Data, has a new book on the world’s environmental problems. It is a great read packed full of lots of interesting information. There are a few things I wouldn’t have done but the book is impressive and has a clear theme. Ritchie wants us to know that…
Distribution Of Preferences Matters
In marketing, we often refer to averages. Indeed, the average does matter. “What does the average person think?”, is often a reasonable enough question to start. Plus, higher average preference is usually better than lower. Unfortunately, this can risk obscuring the fact that the distribution of preferences also matters. Polarizing Brands Xueming Luo, Michael Wiles,…
Helping Experts Perform Consistently
I have recently read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It is a few years old now (2009) but it still has a lot to say about the way the world works as well as Gawande’s aim of helping experts perform consistently. Do Experts Really Need Checklists? Gawande is a doctor and his main area of…
Corporate Social Responsibility
Managers at firms have a long history of seeing their role as more than just making money for their owners. Indeed, many business owners don’t just see business as only a source of profits. One way of discussing the obligations of firms is to discuss Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Today I’m looking at a history…
Getting Beyond Text In Unstructured Data
Unstructured data has massive potential in marketing that is already somewhat being fulfilled. Text analysis has proved a fruitful resource. Using text mining, marketers can seek to uncover messages hidden in massive amounts of words. A typical usage would be attempting to uncover the themes in online reviews written about a product. Yet, unstructured data…
