Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic has a useful book — Storytelling with Data. This contains lots of good advice on Creating Stories With Data Visualizations and generally improving data visualization. She tries to ensure the reader does not lazily follow the first thing a software (e.g., Excel) recommends. This is important, she gives many examples in the…
Category: Market Research
Comparing Canadian And US Consumers
Comparing consumers in different countries can be challenging. I must confess to having doubts about a lot of cross-cultural research, see here for lots of grouchy comments on cross cultural measurement. I worry it is what nice middle class people do when they want to stereotype while still seeing themselves as free of prejudice. Suffice…
What Caused The Classic Polling Disaster?
In presidential election polling 1936 stands out as a uniquely bad disaster. What caused the classic polling pisaster? 1936, The Worst Ever Polling Disaster? In 1936 The Literary Digest made a prediction that Republican Alf Landon would beat the incumbent Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. This rates as arguably the biggest disaster…
The Influence Of Marketing On Managers
The history of business, especially marketing, thought is an interesting topic to me. Modern text analytics techniques can help us get a better understanding of what has happened. If I understand correctly historians seem to be increasing using such techniques. What then can this tell use about the influence of marketing on managers? Changing Topics…
Mathematical Thinking, Cons, And Finding Results
Jordan Ellenberg tells us how to use mathematical thinking to “not be wrong”. He tells us about mathematical thinking, cons, and finding results. Good Advice The advice is often very good. If he wants to call it as a result of mathematics that works for me. Following his advice will help us have better judgment….
What Do Marketing Researchers Research?
It is an important question, at least for academics. What Do Marketing Researchers Research? Doctor Know Thyself Academics love studying themselves. To this end, Cho, Fu, and Wu have dissected what academic marketing researchers have been up to for the past twenty years (1995-2014). They wrote up their results in a recent paper in the…
Measuring The Impact Of Marketing On Wall Street
Bernd Skiera, and a couple of colleagues, have a paper that considers a relatively recent wave of research in marketing academia. They tackle event studies. These look at the impact of specified “events” on the value of a firm. Measuring the impact of marketing on Wall Street. Marketing Events Clearly marketers tend to concentrate on marketing events….
Conducting Business Tests
We should be conducting business tests to have more confidence we are doing the right thing. Small And Big Decisions In business decisions are often taken “without having any real evidence to back them up” (Davenport, 2009, page 69). This is a source of great frustration to me, (and many academics). To be fair sometimes there…
Simpson’s Paradox: Data can be very confusing
One of the strangest things in statistics is Simpson’s paradox. The paradox happens when two sets of data each show the same result. Yet, when you combine the data into a single data set the combined table gives you a different result. Data Can Be Confusing Smith explains this using a click data example. In the data, he shows when you look at…
Predictive Analytics And Vast Search
Eric Siegel has an excellent book on predictive analytics and vast search. As his title suggests these involve lying, buying and dying as well as a few things that don’t rhyme. Applying Analytics The center of his book is a table of applications of predictive analytics. The marketing examples (Table 2) give a number of interesting…
