The only thing I wasn't sure about in writing this article regarding the role of customer knowledge in driving marketing effectiveness was my anchoring metaphor: the roulette table. That’s because, despite occasional visits to the casino, I’ve never actually played the game.
Googling the rules, just to make sure I didn’t fumble the basics, I learned that roulette was invented by the 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, whose scholarly interests included perpetual motion and the laws of probability. Speaking of which, I also learned that the odds of winning on a European-version table (2.63%), which uses only a single zero, are considerably better than on an American-version table (5.26%), which uses both a single and a double zero.
That casinos were able to get away with suddenly upping the house advantage by 100% is just another historic example of American ingenuity.
The article talks about how smart companies like Best Buy are infusing more customer knowledge into their marketing decisions. For starters, this means learning as much as possible about the key attributes and behaviors of profitable customers within narrowly defined segments and then acting upon those insights to deliver relevant and context-sensitive messages and offers.
It also discusses a decision model developed by some of my colleagues at Fair Isaac. The model takes into account a broad array of inputs to determine what set of marketing actions a pharmaceutical company should take for each target physician to maximize revenues. Pay them more sales visits? Increase the number of TV spots? Leave behind more drug samples? The model leverages the fact that there’s an enormous amount of publicly available data that looks at physicians on an individual basis, including their past prescribing behavior.
Of course, if you’re Harrah’s Entertainment, which has gained a lot of attention lately for its own customer analytics prowess, you probably also know their gambling behavior.
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