The age of Big Data has begun. And, as is the case with any major societal or technology shift, both opportunities and challenges abound. No one knows this more than the marketers. We all recognize the vast potential associated with using our web, email, mobile, social, campaign, shopping, and purchase data to create high-performing marketing campaigns that deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Ironically, in many cases, it just isn't clear what actually...
By Matthew Schall
Posted 09/10/2012
There’s no doubt that today’s technology enables loyalty programs – particularly incentive programs – like never before. For this reason, a lot of people are predicting a renaissance of loyalty programs. Most of the discussion focuses on the use of technology, social networks, mobile applications for building your program or how to get your loyalty program to “stick” through incentives. But I believe that loyalty programs aren’t about incentives.
The loyal customer doesn't really...
In a rare interview with Catalysis, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, editor and chief scientist of the world's foremost data mining information site, KDnuggets, shared his views on the future of data mining. Now that data mining (also called predictive analytics and data science) is becoming mainstream, we asked Gregory about its best uses and its future.
Q: What are some of the greatest benefits companies can expect to derive from investing in data mining, and how will those benefits...
Marketers have been segmenting their customers for years but the majority of those marketers limit their segmentations to demographics, frequency of purchase or size of basket. While there’s still value to differentiating your customers and marketing to them based on those segmentations, most marketers are missing out on the opportunity to derive the maximum value possible from this tool.
If you’re new to segmentation or think that you’ve derived all of the value that you can from...
The Hackathon was a 24 hour contest Catalysis was invited to participate in for data mining geeks. Catalysis couldn’t think of anything more fun than letting our analytics team pull an all-nighter to prove their stuff. In this 24 hour long competition, we dealt with data that was quite tough to work with, much like some of the data you may have. We learned a lot, and we are sharing our learning here. We faced 220 chunks of pretty challenging data, each of which was supposed to be specific to...
Our Marketing Analytics team is super geeked to participate in the first ever International Data Science Hackathon! The Hackathon is a part of Big Data Week. It's a competition to create the best predictive air pollution early warning system. The warning system will be used to help warn people suffering from chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma of bad air times and days. We'll be data mining and predicting away from 5:00AM this Saturday to 5:00AM this Sunday for this 24 hour competition...
Many marketing, market research, analytics, and consulting firms offer to segment customers. On the surface, segmentation sounds great. Bucket customers into unique groups. Make the people in each group as similar as possible. Ideally, each segment has the same needs and is of the same value. Clients are told that than you need only craft a strategy for each segment to...