Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

LAG INFORMATION FOR EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS

The decision tree (see Exhibit 7.1) for this section is relatively simply and based on only two questions:

1. Do you know who accepted the offer on a customer level? If you do, you will not need to use statistics in order to estimate relationships between cause and effect. You can simply calculate it. Alternatively, as in the case of a radio spot, often you do not know whether a certain customer made a specific purchase as a result of the radio spot or whether this purchase would have happened anyway. In that case, you would say yes to question 1 and use statistics to establish this link between cause and effect.

Exhibit 7.1 Decision Tree for Evolutionary Process Improvements

2. Do you want to measure the effect of a time-limited campaign, or do you want to optimize an ongoing program based on increased knowledge about cause and effect?

Before we go to the section on how to use lag information in given situations, we present a general introduction to what lag information is.