Gary Smith’s advice on statistics, Standard Deviations, is a really useful and entertaining book. In this Smith points out a number of major problems with the way stats are used. Some problems arise from deliberate tricks played by researchers/managers describing data. Other problems arise through carelessness; the researcher/manager using the data doesn’t realize they are abusing…
Category: Understanding Marketing
The WAITA Model — How To Decide Upon Marketing Metrics
I recently published a short piece for WARC Best Practice on “How to set marketing metrics effectively”. The basic idea behind the piece is an explanation of how to decide upon what marketing metrics to use. This work introduces a new acronym that I’ve produced called the WAITA model. Hopefully, this is easy to remember. Why call…
The Red Queen And Implications For Best Practice
It is hard to spend any time at a business school without hearing the phrase best practice. We teach students best practice. Junior professors seek hints from senior folk on best practice. Even schools regularly go through bouts of benchmarking to see if they are adopting best practice. Best practice essentially is something that gets the most…
The Long-Term Impact Of Advertising
One of marketing’s greatest challenges is that its benefits are often long-term. Spend now, gain later. What is the long-term impact of advertising? Measuring The Long-Term Impact Of Advertising Long-term benefits can be very tough to measure. This is especially true when lots of other activity is happening at the same time. For an analogy…
A Common Marketing Language
A major problem in marketing is that one often has only a general idea of what another marketer is speaking about. “Unfortunately, marketing still does not have that commonality of terminology” (Farris, Reibstein, and Scheller, 2016, page 46). We need a common marketing language. We Lack Shared Meanings A marketer will talk of loyalty and…
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…
Social Network Analysis: Interesting But Still Limited
“Connected” by Christakis and Fowler explains the benefits of social network analysis with fascinating and important stories. Social network analysis tells us who is most likely to catch a habit. This is just like how doctors can predict who is most likely to catch a disease from the person’s place in a network. The analysis of networks helps illuminate a vast range…
Lying With Statistics
While statistics can help us understand the world there is plenty of opportunity to abuse them to mislead. Darrell Huff wrote a short book that was first published in 1952 on lying with statistics. Some of the text shows its age (lots of male pronouns and references to gentleman) but many of the lessons remain applicable today. Reading Huff’s…
How Do Academic Marketers Choose Their Objectives?
I think one of the great problems in marketing academia is that we spend a lot of time thinking about our models and very little time on our data. We have increasing clear views of how things connect up but we don’t really know what it is that we are connecting up. Deciding what objective…
Spurious Correlations: A Big Problem With Big Data?
Tyler Vigen has done great work popularizing Spurious Correlations. He has found an effective way to convey an important message. Namely, that correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things are correlated but that doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with each other. Data Dredging To create his graphs Vigen indulges in: Data Dredging… a technique used…
