Every two years, the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) asks every member company Trustee to provide input to help set priorities for the research that will guide our activities for the next few years.
These priorities enable MSI to engage in its most critical mission: moving the needle on important marketing problems.
One of the priorities focuses on the need to develop new approaches that enable firms to gain insights from multiple approaches, to synthesize, to bring together disparate methods to drive action. There is also a sense that the old methods aren’t working as well, and that some of the traditional indicators and metrics are less effective.
Here are some topics that illustrate where significant research is needed in this area:
- How to bring multiple sources and types of information together to gain insight and to make better decisions (e.g., big data meets unstructured data; data scientist meets anthropologist). Can such synthesis be automated?
- Integrating behavioral theory and marketing frameworks into big data marketing
- How can firms speed up the process by which they collect data, synthesize, identify insights, take action, get feedback, and do any necessary course correction? Is this process different for B2B and B2C?