Capturing Marketing Information to Fuel Growth

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.