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...

Data produces nothing. Changes nothing. Does nothing.

Data is dead.  As dead as a bug nailed to a display in the Smithsonian. If you want to attribute special powers to your consumer data, go right ahead. You may be paying a lot for that data, so I can understand your persistence in wanting to believe it has some value — in and...

The 4 Voices — Now appearing in your local supermarket and all across America

Bass, Tenor, Alto and Soprano — these are the The 4 Voices. That’s all it takes to make a Barber Shop Quartet or sing Handel’s Messiah. While each voice has its own high, middle and low regions, together they span a range of about four octaves. That is the typical playground of all music, vocal...

K.I.S.S.?!

“Keep It Simple — Stupid.” How often have you heard that while preparing a talk or a presentation? Like many such adages it masks a deeper reality. For those who are quick to deliver such advice, or who quietly labor under its influence, I offer the following thoughts. First, there is nothing simple in the...

“The Extreme Slowness of Things…”

Despite living in a world where communication occurs at light speed and information is available immediately at our fingertips, do you ever have the feeling things move breathtakingly slow — as if you’re watching the paint dry? To whom or to what do we attribute this phenomenon, which, in the 19th Century, the English poet and...

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....