Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
The fundamentals of marketing will always be the same, despite the changing forces that shape the future of marketing. Technology connects the world, but customers resist standardization and prefer individualization. The modern-day consumers are sophisticated, knowledgeable and powerful. The ever-changing consumer buying behavior requires identifying the right audience and understanding their buying patterns (Kotler and Keller, 2012). Owing to technological advancements, digitalization and marketing analytics – especially data mining – have become invaluable tools and should be viewed as equal components of the marketing research toolkit (Hauser, 2007).
“The inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Lack in decision-making ranks much higher than the lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of business success” – John C. Maxwell (Moore, 2014). Decision-making is a vital part of the business world. In today's organic structure, in particular, every individual in a company has the autonomy to make a decision that affects the business.
Business decisions affect many things in a company, from return on investment to branding (Ashe-Edmunds, 2017). Moreover, business decisions are prone to bias based on the perceptions of decision makers and organizational limitations, such as organizational structures and regulations (Belwal and Belwal, 2014). To overcome such bias, there is a need for data. The influx of data available to the two major proponents of an economy—customers and firms—has expanded exponentially (Walker, 2012). These large volumes of data, often referred to as “Big Data”, are converted into information that can be utilized for decision-making purposes.
However, the problem that most companies face is deriving value from the data available as a point of entry to information systems. Decision makers in such organizations spend an excessive amount of time analyzing the ever-increasing data available to them to make “the most optimally, the value-creating business decision”. A business needs to employ analytics in its decision-making processes and develop its infrastructure to enable data to be stored, analyzed and used (Pearson and Wegener, 2013).
Consumers no longer pay attention to irrelevant brand communications. Branding in today's context is more to manage the business–consumer relationship in the 21st century (Vrontis and Thrassou, 2007). They now demand individualization, i.e. messages directly tapping their latent needs. Various studies aim at constructing...