ADV vs WOM: Models for marketers

Word of mouth, or viva voce, is the passing of information from person to person by oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Interpersonal influence and word-of-mouth (WOM) are ranked as the most important information source when a consumer is making a purchase decision. These influences are very important, especially in industries whose intangible products are difficult to evaluate prior to their consumption. Furthermore, as WOM becomes digital in the 21st century, the large-scale, anonymous nature of the Web induces new ways of capturing, analyzing, interpreting,...

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Merry Christmas - Marketing, psychology and the world

Santa Claus, Christmas carols, gifts, endless queues at the malls and the local post offices, house decorations and more human externalities! Christmas is here! Hohoho!! But, what does Christmas mean for us? Why "Merry Christmas"? Does Santa really exist? How could Christmas decoration both in houses and in retail stores affect our psychology? Marketers and psychologists are actually curious human beings that have studied almost every aspect of human and consumer behavior, including Christmas psychology! Santa Claus really exists? Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas or simply "Santa", is a mythical...

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Intro to Data Mining for Marketers - Part 2

Data Preprocessing This stage is the most time-consuming stage of the data mining process. Data is never clean and in a form suitable for data mining. There are few typical data corruption problems in business databases such as duplication of the records, missing data fields, and presence of outliers. The preprocessing step involves integrating data from different sources and making choices about representing or coding certain data fields that serve as inputs to the data discovery stage. Such representation choices are needed because certain fields may contain data at level of details not considered suitable...

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Intro to Data Mining for Marketers - Part 1

Data mining can be defined as the process of "discovering patterns, meaning and insights in large datasets by using statistical and computational methods". Data mining works to analyze data stored in data warehouses that are used to store that data that is being analyzed. That particular data may come from all parts of business, from the production to the management. Managers also use data mining to decide upon marketing strategies for their product. They can use data to compare and contrast among competitors. Data mining interprets its data into real time analysis that can be used to increase sales, promote new product, or delete product...

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