Marketing and applied statistics

Today’s New York Times front page article about the attempt of various economists to predict the level of over or undervaluation of homes in different markets brings up a good questions: Is the marketing discipline just behind and resistant in accepting and using statistical methodologies to understand the inner-workings of its discipline or is the impact of marketing just more complex and difficult than understanding the value of real estate properties?

Over the last years I have seen more senior marketing executives acknowledge the importance of statistics and data modeling work but for a majority of them it’s still very difficult to grasp the application of analytics to their daily work with brands, clients, and marketing challenges.

It’s a long road to travel for our marketing discipline while Google and others are already building much faster roads. And they will charge us for traveling on it…