‘We no longer pay for newspapers, but the news; before we know it, Amazon will be charging us per page read instead of per book.’ Marco Bertini, director of the Department of Marketing at ESADE, was explaining one of the major revolutions that data science is already enabling, namely, ‘the division of assets into units of consumption, whose price depends on multiple tangible and intangible factors’. In recent years, this new field of science, which goes hand in hand with big data, has been integrated into the so-called third industrial revolution. In response, the ESADE Alumni Marketing Club used its first Marketing Day to shine a spotlight on it.

With the tagline ‘Back to School’, Marketing Day, organised by the ESADE Alumni Marketing Club, aims to bring ESADE alumni up to speed on the latest marketing trends with sessions by ESADE faculty. Joining Bertini at the event were his fellow ESADE professors Manu Carricano, from the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Science, Bart de Langhe, an associate professor in the Department of Marketing, and Lluis Martínez Ribes. All agreed on one thing: big data is meaningless if it is not supported by a well-designed data architecture developed by professionals in the field.

Making sense of big data

For Carricano, a senior lecturer in the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences at ESADE, the key to interpreting big data is ‘integration’: ‘There is currently no silver bullet on the market: it is still a professional who must choose the data and make them work together to achieve the same objective.’ Nevertheless, any tool such professionals might choose must be able to host data on, at least, ‘transactions, promotions, marketing, channels, competitors and events’. ‘Those are the must haves that any data scientist should be working with’, he stressed. According to Carricano, the outcome of crossing all these data has to serve three clear purposes: it has to ‘generate new data to describe what to do, new data to specify how to do it, and new data to show what happens once it is done.’

Reviews that count

‘Any information consumers provide can be quantified, even qualitative information’, continued Professor De Langhe at the next session of ESADE Alumni Marketing Day. Much of the marketing expert’s research has focused on customer reviews on the main retail platforms, which, in his view ‘can provide very valuable information’, albeit with some qualifications. ‘Customer reviews don’t differ much from expert reviews when the rating is generally low’, De Langhe clarified. ‘However, when a review is good, it is less likely to be indicative. It might be a fake review, a fan responding to an earlier negative review, or an emotional response to a personal situation in which the product is merely anecdotal.’ Building on this explanation, the ESADE professor explained that, for a data scientist, a useful review ‘is not one that says a product is good or that it’s changed your life, but one that provides information about its performance in a real situation’. And how can we quantify all this information? In this regard, De Langhe cautioned against ‘running with the first data you get’. ‘Before you measure anything, you have to ask yourself where it comes from and whether it is sufficiently high-quality.’ ‘Nowadays, we say that consumers are more informed than ever, but are they?’ he concluded.  

From one machine to another

In the final session of ESADE Alumni Marketing Day, Professor Martínez Ribes, a neuromarketing expert, recalled that the brain is also a machine and that it ‘also processes data to make decisions’. However, whilst with technology these decisions are all logical, with human beings that is not the case. ‘Only 15% of the decisions we make are conscious, come from our cortex. The rest are processed by our limbic system and, therefore, are unconscious’, he explained. ‘Put another way, of the 40 megabytes of information the human brain processes in a minute, only 50 kilobytes [one eight hundredth] are conscious.’ Therefore, since science has shown that ‘decision-making is boring’, the ESADE professor recommended imprinting all communication to the consumer with emotion through ‘brain-pleasing marketing, which offers sensations that improve consumers’ lives’.

ESADE Alumni Marketing Day gathered about seventy marketing experts in Barcelona. Mauro Ribó, president of the ESADE Alumni Marketing Club and Business Development Director of Nutrition Premium Brands at PepsiCo, gave the closing remarks.