Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter.
4 Ps

Product
You might think that [...]

The WSJ had a little piece today on personalization - Personalized Emails Are Creepy, Not Effective based on a study done some time ago but still very relevant in today’s market where companies are being told to personalize (including by me). Here are three quotes I think summarize the problem:
[there is a negative] response to [...]

I just finished reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs and I can’t recommend it too highly.
This is a tremendous book laying out a systematic approach for better customer service. Predicated on the idea that customers want your product to “just [...]

Some time ago the folks over at the Analytical Engine had a post about Data Driven Persona Development. I loved the way they described taking a very qualitative approach - persona development - and adding some analytic rigor to it. Given my interest in using analytics for segmentation and in developing different websites/experiences for different [...]

Two articles caught my eye yesterday - Robert Nascenzi wrote an article “Real-Time Segmentation Levels the Playing Field” over on Destination CRM while Jeremy Nedelka wrote “The Ultimate Personalized Marketing” over on 1:1. Both articles focusing me in on what I have called “extreme personalization”. Jeremy’s article was a cute story about a school targeting [...]

A collections session next with folks from Adeptra, Fair Isaac and GE Money talking about GE’s vision for virtual collections. The collections environment is extremely bad this year with massive growth in the need for collection agents. Delinquencies are up, problems are up, consumers are stressed. Scores are worsening (credit profiles are worse), payments are [...]

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst:
No such thing as a business surprise - there is always a warning in advance
but were you listening - did you collect data about it, analyze [...]