Marketing executives focus too much on ever-narrower demographic segments and ever-more-trivial product extensions. They should find out, instead, what jobs consumers need to get done. Those jobs will point the way to purposeful products—and genuine innovation. [...]
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hbr.org 
Marketing
Brands are aggressively using email as a personalization tool, especially in North America. But contrary to other reports, email ranks only sixth in delivering ROI with personalization, although that may be because the metric is difficult to measure, according to The Age of Personalization, a survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Mastercard. North American companies lead the way, with 56% using email for personalization, compared with 47% in Europe and 42% in Asia-Pacific. [...]
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hbr.org
Customization, Study
Do your employees have the skills to benefit from big data? As Tom Davenport and DJ Patil note in their October Harvard Business Review article on the rise of the data scientist, the advent of the big data era means that analyzing large, messy, unstructured data is going to increasingly form part of everyone's work. Managers and business analysts will often be called upon to conduct data-driven experiments, to interpret data, and to create innovative data-based products and services. To thrive in [...]
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hbr.org
Intelligence
But note that, in many cases, she also does things that are hard to track. She can get in her car and drive to a mall to buy the product. She can pick up her phone and order it. She may be prompted to do research on Google for better prices of similar products, or discuss the offer with her spouse or a friend, leading to a possible purchase later. These are all the behaviors that provide the rationale for TV or print advertising. My point is that emails prompt the same kinds of behaviors. Thus, there is an
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hbr.org
Intelligence, Marketing
EPiCβ - Rene's daily Email PiCks
