Marketing is a vast discipline but in my view it has definite themes. Marketing starts with the consumer. This however is a vague statement. What does it mean? The key to starting with the consumer is to remember that the task of marketing is to inform and thus persuade. It is certainly not to bludgeon the hapless consumer into submission. We have to remember that by buying things from us, consumers are doing us a huge favor. This favor is strictly conditional and can be withdrawn at an instant's notice without any previous warning.
What do marketers need in order to inform and persuade? In a word, knowledge. Notice I did not say information. Most marketers demand information but this is stupid. The problem is not lack of information. There is usually far too much information. The problem is a lack of structured information i.e. information that has been analyzed in some fashion. In other words, knowledge.
Having said the above, it needs to be emphasized that the starting point for knowledge is information which means data. So marketers need to collect data but not just any data. They need to collect data on consumers. Specifically data is needed on consumer's needs and wants. This however is not enough. Data by itself is useless. It needs to be put into a structured format i.e. it needs to be converted into knowledge. In other words, the data needs to be analyzed and converted into something useful and usable.
This leads to one inescapable conclusion. Marketers need to be data miners. Marketers need to be actively involved in the data mining process. And the data needs to be collected from all possible sources. This is necessary in order to provide a holistic view of the consumer. We have to keep in mind that consumers do not lead compartmentalized lives. How then can we break up the consumer into discrete portions and declare some portions fit for finance and some for marketing? For too long, data mining has been the domain of computer scientists and IT people. This is stupid. The computer and IT people are more concerned with specific algorithms that try to find patterns in data sets. They don't really understand what the patterns reveal. That is the task of marketers. Sadly, marketers have been neglecting this area till now which also means that their efforts have been less than optimal simply because they have lacked knowledge regarding their consumers.
one way of defining Knowledge is the action taken on the Information. To simplify, when we process data its become Information and if its lying on the desk is still information but someone takes an action based on that info s/he convert it to knowledge. I 100% agree with you that data mining should be the job of professional i.e. the one who is responsible to take decision in their respective domain and not of the techie. The silos we have created either need to be break down or integrated in such a fashion that focus still remain on the main objective.
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