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,…
Category: Market Research
Recommendations Are Complex
Christina Stahlkopf looked at the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a short 2019 Harvard Business Review article. The upshot of the work was that recommendations are complex. We want consumers to be simple but they consistently (and inconsiderately) do things to mess up the metrics that describe them. NPS As A Compass Stahlkopf takes a…
The Benefits Of Simple
There are many papers on the mechanics of NPS (the Net Promoter Score) across various disciplines. In many ways they are easy to write. Fred Reichheld’s original claim was a bold one. Namely, that NPS was the one number you needed to know to grow. It was clearly a sales claim. It was pretty absurd…
NPS And Casino Patrons
I really appreciate when academic papers seek to address issues that matter to non-academics. Sanghee Kim and Tom Gruca looked at the use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to predict customer retention and spending a topic important to many business people. What do they find about NPS and casino patrons? Casinos And Net Promoter A…
Explaining Clustering Simply Has Real Value
I was impressed by Annalyn Ng’s and Kenneth Soo’s short book Numsense. I have already discussed it in a prior post, see here. Today I will note how they discuss clustering. This is central to a lot of marketing analyses. Numsense Covers A Lot Of Basic Data Science The subtitle Data Science for the Layman…
Market Research Lessons
Alex and Mike Sherman have a book of market research lessons. This is a nice little book of sensible ideas. I liked it and will highlight a few of the points that stood out for me. Aims Of The Research Should Impact What You Study This seems obvious, and it is really. Still, it is…
Spoilers And Movie Box Office
What is the relationship between spoilers and movie box office? It is easy to tell a story that spoilers reduce anticipated enjoyment and so lower attendance at movie theaters. (I write during times of Covid so it is hard to imagine how anything reduces attendance further but you get the general idea). Is this the…
Defining Customer Experience And Its Role In Customer Journey
Customer experience is one of those phrases that crop up in marketing that seems important but it isn’t always 100% clear what people mean by it. As such a key task taken on by Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef in a 2016 piece was defining customer experience. They then note how this relates to the…
Web Scraping For Marketers
MSI (the Marketing Science Institute) issues working papers on issues of interest to marketers. The institute’s purpose is to bring together academics and practice. As such MSI advice aims to be of importance to both academics and practitioners. I recently read an interesting offering on web scraping for marketers, written by Johannes Boegershausen, Abhishek Borah,…
Audio Mining And Marketing: Great Potential
We have a recent article on audio mining and marketing, see here. It is an exciting topic. Unstructured data is increasing being analyzed. Audio data, a key type of unstructured data, has great potential to give insight. People Use Their Voices To Persuade People often use their voices to persuade. This can be positive or…
