JM Insights in the Classroom
Teaching Insight:
There is a gap between data and analytics growth and firm growth – Investing in data and analytics through the lens of the customer equity framework can help close that gap.
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Related Marketing Courses:
Marketing Strategy
Full Citation:
Du, Rex, Oded Netzer, David A. Schweidel, Debanjan Mitra (2020), “Capturing Marketing Information to Fuel Growth,” Journal of Marketing.
Article Abstract:
Marketing is the functional area primarily responsible for driving the organic growth of a firm. In the age of digital marketing and big data, marketers are inundated with increasingly rich data from an ever-expanding array of sources. Such data may help marketers generate insights about customers and competitors. One fundamental question remains: How can marketers wrestle massive flows of existing and nascent data resources into coherent, effective growth strategies? Against such a backdrop, the Marketing Science Institute has made “capturing information to fuel growth” a top research priority. We begin by discussing the streetlight effect—an overreliance on readily available data due to ease of measurement and application—as contributing to the disconnect between marketing data growth and firm growth. We then use the customer equity framework to structure our discussion of six areas where we see substantial under-tapped opportunities—incorporating social network and biometric data in customer acquisition, trend and competitive interaction data in customer development, and unstructured and causal data in customer retention. We highlight challenges that obstruct firms from realizing such data-driven growth opportunities and how future research may help overcome those challenges.
Special thanks to Holly Howe (Ph.D. candidate at Duke University) and Demi Oba (Ph.D. candidate at Duke University), for their support in working with authors on submissions to this program.
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