Capturing Marketing Information to Fuel Growth

TLDR

Marketing drives organic growth, and the digital era floods marketers with rich data that could generate customer and competitor insights, yet the challenge remains how to translate these massive data flows into coherent growth strategies. The Marketing Science Institute has identified capturing information to fuel growth as a top research priority. The authors explain that the streetlight effect hampers data‑driven growth and propose using the customer equity framework to identify six underexploited opportunities—social network and biometric data for acquisition, trend and competitive interaction data for development, and unstructured and causal data for retention. They outline the obstacles preventing firms from leveraging these data opportunities and suggest directions for future research to overcome them.

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. The authors 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. They then use the customer equity framework to structure the discussion of six areas where they see substantial undertapped 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. The authors highlight challenges that obstruct firms from realizing such data-driven growth opportunities and how future research may help overcome those challenges.