Marketing Analytics Holds Many Surprises

December 29, 2015

What I find interesting is how data analysts, software developers, and other big data pushers are always saying things like “hidden insights await in data” or “your business will turn around with analytics.” These people make it seem like it is big thing, when it is really the only logical outcome that could entail from employing new data analytics. Marketing Land continues with this idea in the article, “Intentional Serendipity: How Marketing Analytics Trigger Curiosity Algorithms And Surprise Discoveries.”

Serendipitous actions take place at random and cannot be predicted, but the article proclaims with the greater amount of data available to marketers that serendipitous outcomes can be optimized. Data shows interesting trends, including surprises that make sense but were never considered before the data brought them to our attention.

“Finding these kinds of data surprises requires a lot of sophisticated natural language processing and complex data science. And that data science becomes most useful when the patterns and possibilities they reveal incorporate the thinking of human beings, who contribute the two most important algorithms in the entire marketing analytics framework — the curiosity algorithm and the intuition algorithm.”

The curiosity algorithm is the simple process of triggering a person’s curious reflex, then the person can discern what patterns can lead to a meaningful discovery. The intuition algorithm is basically trusting your gut and having the data to back up your faith. Together these make explanatory analytics help people change outcomes based on data.

It follows up with a step-by-step plan about how to organize your approach to explanatory analytics, which is a basic business plan but it is helpful to get the process rolling. In short, read your data and see if something new pops up.

Whitney Grace, December 29, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under algorithms, Analytics, Data, Marketing, News, Search, Security

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.