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….
NPS And Potential Customers
The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) remains an outlier in marketing metrics. NPS is undoubtedly focused on ‘marketing’ issues but is very widely used across business. Senior managers often know NPS, indeed, they are often the ones promoting it. Is it any good though? The evidence for such a widely used metric is far from overwhelming….
Customer Accounting, Thanks But
It is great that accountants are looking at the idea of valuing a firm through its customers. I very much welcome this. That said, I do worry that people bringing ideas from outside their field often bring back bad habits with them. (To be clear I am sure I do this when looking at non-marketing…
Barriers To Implementing CLV
A lot of the early work on customer lifetime value (CLV) comes from the world of direct marketing. This makes sense given an obvious use of CLV is to manage a customer base. Using CLV you can help decide who to try and acquire, what your retention efforts should be, and who might be good…
The Origins Of Customer Equity
Customer equity is a concept that seems to have had its day in marketing. It arose, and it seems to me somewhat went away, relatively quickly. A 1996 article on the Harvard Business Review by Robert Blattberg and John Deighton lays out the idea of managing by a customer equity test. In many ways, this…
Understanding The Value Of Customers
Before CLV had become a big thing in marketing strategy Francis Mulhern looked at the challenge of understanding the value of customers. There are a lot of good points in the article. Measurement Problems In Understanding The Value Of Customers One of the most obvious challenges is that the data to allow us to understand…
Customer-Based Corporate Valuation
I think the idea of using customer information in corporate valuation is a great one. As such, I am very receptive to work on customer-based corporate valuation. A 2005 paper in Management Decision I think well illustrates some of the challenges I have seen in this field. Lots of good ideas, some reasonable points, but…
Alexander The Great Man?
One way I judge people is how they see Alexander the Great. This is a very helpful approach to judging others. Invariably any celebration of the Macedonian king gives insight into the flaws of the person doing the celebrating. There is one rather obvious weakness with my approach to judging character. You might be surprised…
Ostriches, Eagles, And Leadership Storytime
I am a historian by initial training and I love a good story. Though the great man (gender deliberate) of history approach has had its day there are still things that we can learn from stories of notable individuals. JB Steenkamp’s Time To Lead is the archetype of old-fashioned history-based leadership work. When you think…
