Abstract
Despite the growth in the size and complexity of corporate data, the technology for analyzing it has not kept up with the advances in data collection, in that managers mostly need to rely on marketing research and information systems experts to generate the analysis and reports they need. We review some useful approaches here from the computer science and information systems fields for the analysis of large data sets, viz. good data organization and the use of flexible analysis tools, for making the analysis more tractable and user-friendly. These methods are increasingly being adopted by practitioners who are hard-pressed to generate business intelligence from large corporate databases. However, the benefits of these approaches may not be confined only to practitioners, and may apply to academic researchers working with large data sets, as well.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blattberg, R. C., R. Glazer, and J. D. C. Little (1994), The Marketing Information Revolution, Harvard Business School Press.
Blattberg, R. C., and J. Deighton (1991), “Interactive Marketing: Exploiting the Age of Addressability,” Sloan Management Review, Fall, pp. 5–14.
Batini, C., S. Ceri, and S. Navathe (1992), Database Design: An Entity-Relationship Approach, Benjamin/Cummings.
Bessen, J. (1993), “Riding the Marketing Information Wave,” Harvard Business Review, September.
Caldwell, Bruce (1996), “Wal-Mart Ups the Pace,” Information Week, December 9, number 609, pp. 37–43.
Chen, P. (1976), “The Entity-Relationship Model—Toward a Unified View of Data,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 1(1).
Codd, E. F. (1970), “A Relational Model for Large Shared Data Banks,” Communications of the ACM, 13(6), pp. 377–387.
Codd, E. F. (1993), Providing OLAP to User-Analysts: An IT Mandate, E.F. Codd and Associates.
Creeth, R., and N. Pendse (1996), The OLAP Report: Succeeding with On-Line Analytical Processing, Norwalk, CT: Business Intelligence, Inc.
Date, C. J. (1990), An Introduction to Database Systems, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 5th edition, volume 1.
Elder, J. IV and D. Pregibon (1996), “A Statistical Perspective on Knowledge Discovery in Databases,” in U. M. Fayyad, G. Piatetsky-Shapiro, P. Smyth, and R. Uthurusamy, eds., Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI Press/MIT Press.
Elmasri, R. and S. B. Navathe (1994), Fundamentals of Database Systems, Benjamin/Cummings, 2nd edition.
Fayyad, U. M., G. Piatetsky-Shapiro, and P. Smith (1996), Advances in Knowledge and Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI Press/MIT Press.
Fayyad, U. M. (1997), “Editorial to the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,” volume 1, number 1.
Foley, John (1997), “Market of One: Ready, Aim, Sell,” Information Week, February 20.
—(1996), “Mining Data for a Marketing Plan,” Information Week, July 8.
Glymour, C., D. Madigan, D. Pregibon, and P. Smyth (1997), “Statistical Themes and Lessons for Data Mining,” Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 1(1), pp. 11–28.
Hull, R., and R. King (1987), “Semantic Database Modeling: Survey, Applications, and Research Issues,” ACM Computing Surveys, 19(3).
Jackson, R., and P. Wang (1996), Strategic Database Marketing, NTC Business Books.
Kimball, R. (1996), The Data Warehouse Toolkit, John Wiley & Sons.
Kudrass, T., M. Lehmbach, and A. Buchmann (1996), “Tool-Based Re-Engineering of a Legasy MIS: An Experience Report,” in P. Constantopoulos, J. Mylopoulos, and Y. Vassiliou, eds., Proceedings of the 8th International CAiSE Conference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, number 1080.
Mattison, R. (1994), “Surf City, Here We Come,” Data Management Review, October.
McFadden, F. R., and J. A. Hoffer (1994), Modern Database Management, Benjamin Cummings Publishing, 4th edition.
Neslin, S., G. Allenby, A. Ehrenberg, S. Hoch, G. Laurent, R. Leone, J. Little, L. Lodish, R. Shoemaker, and D. Wittink (1994), “A Research Agenda for Making Scanner Data More Useful to Managers,” Marketing Letters, vol. 1995, Kluwer Academic Press.
Rangaswamy, A., B. Harlam, and L. M. Lodish (1989), “INFER: An Expert System for Automatic Analysis of Scanner Data,” Working Paper no. 89–009R, The Wharton School, Marketing Department.
Schmitz, J., G. Armstrong, and J. Little (1990), “CoverStory—Automated News Finding in Marketing,” Interfaces, 20, pp. 29–38.
Sen, S. (1998), “An Overview of Data Mining and Marketing,” in Proceedings of the 1998 Academy of Marketing Science Conference.
Tukey, J. W. (1977), Exploratory Data Analysis, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
Ullman, J. (1988), Principles of Database and Knowledge-Base Systems, Computer Science Press.
Watson, R. T. (1998), Data Management: An Organizational Perspective, John Wiley & Sons.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sen, S., Tuzhilin, A. Making Sense of Marketing Data: Some MIS Perspectives on the Analysis of Large Data Sets. Journal of Market-Focused Management 3, 91–111 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009746706930
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009746706930