Profiting from the Data Economy: Understanding the Roles of Consumers, Innovators and Regulators in a Data-Driven World

Foreword: The Personalized and the Personal

Fifty years ago, the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s idea was that the modern media—no less than the specifics of the content they convey—affect society in profound ways that merit closer scrutiny. In today’s world of Big Data, an analogous idea is at play in the marketing domain.

Many of the concepts central to David Schweidel’s timely and perceptive new book have been with us for a long time. Business analytics—the use of data analysis to drive better business decisions—dates back at least as far as the invention of credit scoring in the late 1950s. In marketing, the use of transactional and customer-level data dates back at least ...