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<\/a>The Killer – by Roopam<\/p><\/div>\n
Last week we started a case study from the online retail industry to learn more about marketing analytics (Read Part 1<\/a>). Before we continue with the same case, let me share a few factors that enhance the quality of analysis for marketing or customer analytics. The obvious factors, of course, are the analysts’ inclination & expertise toward business problem solving, and love for data, maths, and numbers. Moreover, to understand customers better, analysts also need to have the keenness to understand human behavior. The primary branches of science that enhance our understanding of\u00a0why humans behave the way they do are psychology, sociology, and neuroscience.<\/p>\n Psychology is the study of an individual’s behavior; sociology, on the other hand, studies the social behavior of\u00a0humans. Neuroscience has been the game changer in the last few decades\u00a0for our understanding of human brain and behavior. The advanced imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are elucidating\u00a0the inaccessible areas of the brain and its\u00a0functions. These are still early days but we are living in exciting times where we are learning so many\u00a0cool things about human behavior. Let me explore a bit more about human behavior by analyzing the most deviant behavior of all, by analyzing…<\/p>\n Murder is a horrible crime, but the most heinous murderers are serial killers or psychopaths. These outliers (thankfully!) in our society are characterized as\u00a0offenders for the killing\u00a0of two or more victims in separate events. The worst serial killers like Ted Bundy are responsible killing more than 30 victims, all unknown to them, for no specific reason.\u00a0Psychopaths often display behavior such as lack of empathy, poor self-control,\u00a0<\/span>excessive risk taking, superficial charm, and grandiosity. Let us peek inside the brain to understand the epicenter of these characteristics i.e. lack of empathy, poor self-control. We will come back a little later to other behaviors of psychopaths like\u00a0excessive risk taking, superficial charm, and\u00a0grandiosity. In this process, we will learn more about human behavior.<\/p>\n Titanic the Movie<\/p><\/div>\n Remember the last scene of the movie Titanic<\/em>, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (Jack Dawson) was about to die in the chilling water of the Atlantic ocean. In this scene, he was\u00a0urging his girlfriend Rose (Kate Winslet) to go on living a happy and long life. This made\u00a0some people bawl in\u00a0the movie-theater, and the remaining\u00a0audience felt\u00a0deeply touched by this unfortunate event on the screen. This tendency of human beings to associate and feel other people’s pain and joy is called empathy. Marketers are of course aware of this fact and use this effectively in advertising to make you establish a deeper emotional connect with their product.<\/p>\n Psychopaths or serial killers do not feel empathy. This is the reason it becomes easy for them to torture people to death. The lack of empathy in psychopaths is because of a neurological disorder in their brains. Mirror neurons, part of an intricate and detailed circuitry of \u00a0brain neural networks, connect the emotion centers of the brain with sensory organs like eyes etc. Mirror neuron circuitry in psychopaths is found to be impaired hence the emotional centers of their brain\u00a0don’t get ignited enough for them to feel another person’s pain.<\/p>\n Coming back to serial killers, in analytics and modeling terms,\u00a0the key determining variables \/ factors for their aberrant\u00a0activities are linked to both nature (genetics, brain activities etc.) and nurture (upbringing, parenting, the behavior of society etc.). “Genetics loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger<\/em>.” This statement by\u00a0Francis Collins, director NIH, sums up the role of genetics and society for creating killers.<\/p>\n Human behavior is so complicated as it is an amalgamation of so many factors \/ variables. It\u00a0is essential\u00a0for good marketing analysts to be a keen observer of human behavior. The job of marketing analyst is not just to crunch numbers but to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior. A good marketing analyst reveals not just how customers behave but also why customers behave the way they do. Keeping this in mind, let’s move back to the marketing analytic case study we started last week:<\/p>\n After the CMO left your office (read the earlier part<\/a>), you asked your analysts to pull out a few numbers from the company’s data warehouse for the cost of campaigns and profit. Using the data you figured out that the variable cost of running a campaign for each solicitation is around $2.3. Additionally, every customer that uses a marketing catalog is generating around $56\u00a0in profit. You did a quick back of the envelope calculation to estimate the profit from the campaigns<\/p>\nNeuroscience of Murder<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/a>A\u00a0crucial part of the human brain responsible for our emotions is the frontal lobe (OK I know I am using quite a few jargon here, but this part of the brain is really cool. I will tell you more about the frontal lobe in some later article.). The frontal lobe is also responsible for self-awareness and self-control. For psychopaths the frontal lobe shows much less activity than a normal brain, hence they\u00a0display the lack of self-control. Marketers and advertisers often test everyone’s\u00a0self-control through their appealing messages and visual techniques. \u00a0We have all bought useless products\u00a0at various points of our lives while succumbing to lack of self-control. It is interesting how neuroscience is linking our behavior to activities in our brain.<\/p>\nMarketing<\/span>\u00a0Analytics Case Study Example<\/span><\/h2>\n