“Everything comes back to Big Data.” This was a network security consultant’s conclusion. He was telling me about an international retailer’s data breach. The retailer had warnings that a breach was imminent. However, those warnings were lost among the millions of ultimately benign but undifferentiated notices of possible attack. What was missing, my friend concluded, was some type of signal …
Seven Common Problems with Tech Marketing and What to Do Instead
I spoke with a CMO recently who claimed that he and his team were experts at the new way technology is marketed. I was taken aback by the assertion. It’s not that I doubted him. But what matters is how prospects are buying. We necessarily must market to their needs and behavior. If prospects’ behavior has changed, or if there …
Are We Big Data Ready? Beyond the Easy Answers of Clicks and Response Rates
For some of us, extracting intelligence from “big data” has been a practice for decades or more. We simply didn’t have a convenient buzzy term for it. What hasn’t changed over that time is the necessity to extract meaningful, actionable intelligence and apply it to grow a business. Factoring each business’s unique environment, opportunities, competition, resources, limits, etc. are all …
Data-Based Intelligence Demands Critical Thinking
Technology supports the collection of data from a myriad of sources: websites, real life, social, on and on. That data has so much potential for improving our understanding of customers’ needs and their decision processes. Because of the opportunity to improve targeting, speed the purchase cycle, and build customer relationships, all that collected data promises powerful competitive advantage. To achieve …