Marketing and Sales Analytics: Proven Techniques and Powerful Applications from Industry Leaders

6. Practical Research—Beyond Studies for Studies’ Sake

Historically, marketing channels in particular generated little data directly. You couldn’t really tell how many people actually watched, heard, read, or passed by an ad, so primary research became the first dominant analytic discipline for the marketing function. This research mostly asked people about their exposure to and experiences with advertising and marketing, current or planned, through small focus groups and larger surveys. If customer behaviors were directly observed, in real time or, say, through recordings, samples for these direct behaviors tended to be small, episodic, and inconsistent in design.

Since some data is better than none, things operated this way for quite some time. ...