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…
Treating Customers As Assets
There were several papers, and a book, that followed but Sunil Gupta and Donald Lehmann had a really interesting 2003 piece in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. This was about treating customers as assets. Much of the best ideas in this field are already on show there in this early paper. Marketing And Firm Value…
Belief In Mythical Numbers
The strategy setting process in any organization is always an interesting one. Given its centrality to the idea of managing an organization you might think people had the process down. You would be wrong. Vikas Mittal and Shridhari Sridhar look at the strategy setting process through extensive interviews and surveys. It isn’t always a pretty…
A Customer Equity Balance Sheet
The book, Customer Equity, is a bit of a classic in the marketing field. It is an early attempt to refocus companies from products to customers, specifically through measurement of the value of the customer base. The authors introduce a lot of interesting new ideas. They have many admirably big swings and, to be honest,…
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…
Valuing Firms Through Their Customers
The basic idea of valuing a firm through its customers is an excellent one. There was a collection of works looking to do this early in the millennium. This was partly motivated by the challenges of the dot-com boom. In this boom firms had high valuations but low profit (or more likely losses). The valuation…
What Drives Customer Equity?
Around the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of interest in the idea of customers as financially relevant. Thus work started to concentrate on the idea of customer equity. Customer equity was sometimes equated with the idea of customers as assets. This is an important aim (even though I have some measurement quibbles)….
A Unified Theory Of Marketing
One of the challenges with marketing is that there are so many bits that don’t fit together. As such let me put on record that I appreciate the potential for customers to be put at the center of all the marketing approaches. CLV, the value of a customer to the firm, has potential for a…
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…
Anecdotal Evidence Is Problematic In Justifying Arguments
Jerry Muller’s book on The Tyranny of Metrics argues that metrics are overused. (I have discussed other frustrations with the book here). Muller, however, very neatly illustrates the problem with his approach. Anecdotal evidence, by this here I mean stories not rigorously detailed, is problematic in justifying an argument. Basically he throws some numbers into…