ABSTRACT
The growth in use of social media platforms, data mining, and artificial intelligence has significantly altered the way people behave and buy products and services. Traditional marketing approaches of understanding and segmenting customers for the purposes of targeting are increasingly falling short of capturing today’s complex consumer. Advances in technologies have made it easy to capture phenomenal amounts of data about consumer habits at different touch points. Unfortunately, the ‘big data’ that are collected about customers become this massive cloud that conjures images of drowning in data while also being starved of quality data. This calls for more targeted ways of mining this data and utilising it to generate marketing intelligence that helps organisations identify and respond to customer needs with pinpoint accuracy. Sadly, while marketing analytics offers such promise, the skills to deploy this are seemingly scarce resulting in a paradox of the hyped-up role of marketing analytics on the one hand and the low perceived impact of marketing analytics in driving business performance on the other. This chapter draws insights from an empirical study that was conducted among 30 small and medium enterprises in the UK’s East Midlands region to explore some of the possible benefits of marketing analytics, the barriers for adoption as well as recommendations to drive uptake. Key among the root causes of the low uptake of marketing analytics are the skills gaps which are tracked back to institutions of higher learning which while continuing to offer business courses, have lagged behind the fast pace of technological changes driving the need for marketing analytics.
