Business Intelligence is Customer Intelligence

It couldn’t be more obvious.  And yet, for most marketers, it escapes notice. It couldn't be more strategically fruitful.  And yet, for most business strategists, it never shows up on their radar. It couldn’t be more fundamental to our very existence as human beings and our ability to get along with each other. Yet most people, to...

Customer Service: The Mythic Realm

Look out! The Aggrieved Consumer is preparing to battle your company! Because — you can fill in the blank… the item arrived late or damaged… parts were missing ... the invoice was incorrect... or any number of a thousand things that can go wrong in the course of human affairs — he’s as angry as...

There’s no point arguing with gravity, right?

Present estimates place the earth around 4.5 billion years old, whereas the earliest human record goes back a mere 200,000 years. Our story, therefore, the story of humankind, begins much later in the action than most people realize. Finding ourselves positioned between a very distant past and a future that, we can presume, extends indefinitely,...

Why Cheaters and Scoundrels Never Win (in the Long Run) — And W​hat Data Has To Do With It

I will take as a shining example the Parthenon in Greece, which, after nearly 3,000 years, still survives as an enduring symbol of Hellenistic culture and democracy. Why has it endured for so long? One reason is there is compelling evidence that it is laid out according to the design of the “sacred cut.” In...

Rewarding Relevance — How Facebook Got it Right

If relevance had a higher place in the social order, we can speculate that we would be less likely to bore each other with self-serving or innocuous banter, like the weather or what we had for breakfast. People would undoubtedly show more regard for each other. And in order to achieve that they would need...

Meet Your New Copywriter — But Don’t Expect It To Join You For Lunch

It’s May of 1997. Gary Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, losses to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in their second tournament. Just another event? Hardly. The notion that certain levels of human cognizing could never be surpassed by a machine was shattered. Okay, maybe you weren’t shocked at Kasparov’s defeat, or you were too young...

On Throwing Creatives Under The Bus — Can Better Data End This Practice?

“The creative” — which, if you are not quite familiar with the vernacular — refers to the materials produced by the creative department of a marketing entity. The creative is a product of everything that went into it, such as research, strategy, audience selection, media planning, data modeling, along with a lot of midnight oil....

You Are An Energy State — Which Is Reflected In Your Motivational Style

Our senses are always misleading us. We look ‘out’ and see a world that appears solid. And feels solid. In reality, it is anything but. It’s not that we live in denial about this reality. The problem is that it is not possible to perceive this reality as it actually is, given our physiological constraints...

Words And Their Resonance — From Psycho-Lexical Analysis to Text-Analysis and Social-Media Mining

We’ve come a long way since Genesis 1.1. ("In the beginning was the word.") Today, there are infinitely more things, actions, and conditions than there are specific words to denote them. This is an obvious fact. But unless you have spent hours at a stretch searching for just the right word, or diligently coaxing various...

Why Ask “Why?” — Questioning Some Basic Marketing Conventions

Marketers universally recognize that a fundamental aspect of the acquisition process is identifying the “Who.” The Who usually represents a tidy description of the people they want to buy their product. Data points such as age, gender, income, and credit-worthiness — these categories are typically enough to satisfy the Who. The next question is invariably...