In our last post I introduced to you the SPIRAL Framework that can help marketers plan their technology roadmap. But a framework is directional in nature and the nitty-gritties of the individual phases are critical for ensuring outcomes.

One of my more interesting conversations as a Marketing Technology Consultant was with a Fortune 500 Marketing division some time ago.

Meet Jim. Jim is looking to throw the ultimate birthday party for his 4 year old son and has quite a ‘to- do’ list for the party. Jim decides to kick off his party prep by logging on to his trusty ecommerce store and begins shopping, beginning with ingredients for the birthday cake.

Association analysis – in the context of consumer product affinity, is also called Market Basket Analysis. It is an unsupervised algorithm – easier to comprehend if you understand the supervised model. Consider a case where the temperature and humidity in a particular location are given, you are trying

The goal of classification is to build rules or models and represent them in a simple readable form using past decisions. There are multiple techniques that can accomplish this task of gleaning intelligence from existing data – Neural Networks, SVMs, Decision Trees and so on.

Clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects so that objects in the same group are more similar to each other than objects in another group.  Well, now that the formal definition is through, we can get down to brass tacks – just replace the term objects in the definition with “customers “ and we’ll be on our way.

Marketers need to comprehend that a cloud based marketing platform is enticing but SHARED across other customers of the ESP / MSP.  If their campaigns have a performance problem, you can bet your boots that your holiday / week end campaign gets hit as well.

Marketing technologists need to be increasingly aware of the constraints that come in her/his away in staging successful email campaign.

Before getting onboard a PhD in Data Mining or acquiring one, there is some level of magic a marketer can do with the behavioral database he has set up, without the need for advanced analytical Tools.

With 2015 galloping forward, we have cumulated what we believe to be the most pertinent predictions for CMOs this year. These predictions have been curated from the most trusted minds across industries, viz. Forrester, IDC, marketingtechblog.com and marketingland.com, amongst others.