This post will tell you why B2B pricing is interesting, at least to me. (B2B being business to business marketing). I’ll point to some useful advice. That said, the advice also illustrates the conceptual challenges with pricing in channels. The challenges are so significant that it is sometimes hard to keep clear what is being…
Category: Understanding Marketing
A Framework For AI In Marketing
At the risk of stating the obvious artificial intelligence (AI) is a subject of great interest in marketing. Indeed, beyond marketing too at the moment. There is a lot of discussion of how companies can take advantage of the opportunities (and avoid the downsides). Raj Venkatesan and Jim Lecinski have a new book that sets…
Cynicism About Data
Tim Harford’s latest book targets cynicism about data. The villain of the piece is Darrell Huff. Huff is the author of a fun book on lying with statistics, see here for more. Harford argues we are in danger of writing off the value of statistics. Instead, we need to develop clearer ideas for understanding statistics….
Use Of Humor In Business
I must confess to being a bit jealous of Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas. They get to teach a course on the use of humor in business. It seems like they have a great time doing it. They meet a lot of fun people and do a lot of interesting activities. (As well as doing…
Marketers Have To Turn Up
Koen Pauwels, a well-known marketing academic at Northeastern University, has a very useful book on working with marketing data. He focuses a lot on marketing dashboards and analyzing data. Rather than attempt to relay all the points, you can read it yourself, I want to focus on a little anecdote about the creation of the…
Virtue Signaling And Balancing Reasonable Perspectives
Geoffrey Miller‘s Virtue Signaling is a compilation of some of his work. All pieces are relatively popular and accessible. In addition to sexual selection this tackles problems related to virtue signaling and balancing reasonable perspectives in speech. The Coddling of the American Mind was a clearly written thesis. Miller’s book is a little different to…
The Pseudo Profound Statement
I have previously written about how disappointed I was by Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, see here and here. Today I will look at a broader problem that his book exhibits. Namely ‘The Pseudo Profound Statement’. I see this in a lot of places not just in Muller’s work. Be Careful With A Pseudo…
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…
Why Would You Go Test Optional?
In 2020 many universities decided to become: “test-optional” for entrance, see here. This was an interesting development. My worry is that test-optional isn’t always the benevolent response from universities that it might seem to some. I was reading about this in a chapter by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. I would want to know more…
Prejudice Against The Machine: Impact Of Chatbot Identity Disclosure
Whenever technology progresses a major question arises: What can technology do as well, or better, than humans? Since the luddites, and probably before, people reacted to technology with hostility. This raises the question whether machine learning algorithms can replicate (or outperform human behavior) but still be unpopular due to human reaction. A group of authors…
