On Storks and Babies: Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments
Name
[18655866 - Marketing Intelligence Review] On Storks and Babies_ Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments.pdf
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761.41 KB
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Author(s) •
Lambrecht, Anja
Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth
Date Issued
October 2016
Journal
GfK Marketing Intelligence Review
Publisher
de Gruyter
Citation
Lambrecht, Anja, and Catherine E. Tucker. “On Storks and Babies: Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments.” GfK Marketing Intelligence Review 8, 2 (November 2016): 24–29
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The explosion of available data has created much excitement among marketing practitioners about their ability to better understand the impact of marketing investments. Big data allows for detecting patterns and often it seems plausible to interpret them as being causal. While it is quite obvious that storks do not bring babies, marketing relationships are usually less clear. If marketers want to be sure they are not walking into a causality
trap, they need to conduct field experiments to detect true causal relationships. In the present digital environment,
experiments are easier than ever to undertake, but they need to be prepared and interpreted with great care in order to deliver meaningful and genuinely causal results that help improve marketing decisions.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1515/GFKMIR-2016-0012