Big Data Marketing: Engage Your Customers More Effectively and Drive Value

Foreword

Why did you get into marketing? I am guessing that it's not because you had a burning desire to refine propensity models until the wee hours of the morning, or to wrestle with integrating social media comments with web clickstream data. But those are exactly the kinds of activities that make marketers great these days. The function is undergoing a dramatic transformation toward a world of data-driven decisions that this book describes in detail. You may have gravitated toward marketing because it is one of the most creative areas of business, and you still need to possess that attribute to succeed. But creativity is increasingly judged not only in the human imagination, but also in clickthroughs, conversions, and lift.

Marketing is not, of course, the only area of business undergoing this transformation. Few people enter the retail industry because they have a fascination with point-of-sale data, and few baseball fans want to work for a team so they can compute its Pythagorean winning percentage. The world in general is becoming more data-driven, and the change in marketing is only one example of that overall shift.

However, as Lisa Arthur details in the chapters that follow, the change in marketing is especially dramatic. In little more than a decade, the function has gone from emphasizing pretty pictures and catchy phrases to one that captures, integrates, and analyzes data of all types. Needless to say, many marketers—and the managers outside the function who relate ...