As algorithms play greater and greater roles in our lives a reasonable question is: “are they fair?” The answer is often; “no, not really”. To be clear that doesn’t necessarily mean algorithms are making the world worse. If things were unfair before (and they were) then just knowing that things are unfair now can’t tell…
Don’t Use One Industry To Create Examples For CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Lloyd Melnick has a short and snappy book on customer lifetime value (which he terms LTV). At its best this is a useful insight into the games industry. There is a lot of detail there in a very easy to read form. For example, you will learn about ARPU (Average Revenue per User) and ARPDAU…
Corporate Political Advocacy
A fascinating question for corporations is how much they should get involved in politics. What is the role for Corporate Political Advocacy? Sometimes Politics Just Comes For You It can be hard to avoid politics sometimes; it just involves some companies by accident. I have no inside knowledge but I doubt Delta really had an…
Artificial Intelligence And Its Challenges
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has thrown up all sorts of questions for business and society. What then of artificial intelligence and its challenges? What To Do With It One of the first problems was recognizing what to do with it. Nowadays we can see AI making considerable impacts on the world but that this would happen…
Political Candidate Brand Strength
Beth Fossen, David Schweidel and Michael Lewis published a paper on political candidate brand strength in Customer Needs and Solutions. They used inspiration from the idea of performance premium measures of brand strength. In essence, these measures consider how a brand should be doing given certain important features. Then they look at how it is…
Marketing Strategy and Electoral Politics
As part of our special issue on political marketing, Sridhar Moorthy wrote a piece explaining marketing strategy and electoral politics. This uses ideas from competition theory. He focuses on analytical models. These are models based on mathematical theory. (Empirical models, on the other hand, are based upon observed data). Spend Does Not Necessarily Deliver Results…
Two-Part Tariffs and Disneyland
Interesting questions often precipitate (good) academic research. A great question is “why does Disneyland not make you pay for each ride”. This is the setup for Walter Oi’s examination of pricing back in 1971. Oi asks “If you were the owner of Disneyland, should you charge high lump sum admission fees and give the rides…
The Practitioner-Research Divide Beyond Marketing
Neil Anderson and his colleagues have given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice. They focus on this in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. I don’t know much about this discipline. Still, a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. As such, they highlight the practitioner-research divide beyond marketing. In…
Double Entry Bookkeeping
It is helpful for marketers to understand accounting. The phrase double entry bookkeeping has a tendency to put people off but that is unfortunate. The idea that each event is represented by two entries is an elegant one. Marketers can learn a lot from the strengths of such an approach. Double Entry Bookkeeping Aids Understanding…
Empirical Political Marketing Research
As part of our recent Customer Needs and Solutions political marketing issue Mitch Lovett, a professor at the University of Rochester, describes key issues in empirical political marketing research. Key Empirical Political Marketing Research Data Sources Lovett outlines key data sources. These include the (US) National Election Studies and polls. Voting behavior/intentions can be combined…
