Marketing tactics that come across as unethical, intrusive or creepy are best avoided. That makes it imperative for organisations to embrace their role as good custodians of customer data and work to win customer trust by keeping it safe and using it only for purposes to which the customer has previously agreed. A high level of visibility leads to better customer intelligence and, from there, to a better customer experience.
Again, from the order history of an e-commerce customer, for example, a retailer will typically be able to see not only their personal purchases, but also details of gifts - who they were bought for, when and where they were delivered. In a world where responsible custodianship of customer data is a new differentiator for businesses and a growing factor in customer purchase decisions, a better approach is needed.
Indeed, as coronavirus-related lockdown rules are eased and consumer spending begins to recover, companies will be fighting extra hard to reattract and retain once-loyal customers. But is there any experimental evidence to show that's the case in IRL social groups? As Derek explains , the whole basis of the theory came from a short story called Chains, in which one of the characters challenges the others to find another person on Earth that he can not connect himself to through fewer than five intermediaries.
This idea wasn't scientifically tested until the s, when a psychologist sent packages out to people in Nebraska and Boston, and asked them to use their networks to get them back to one specific target - a stockbroker living in Boston.
They weren't asked to forward it to him directly, but to send it to someone they knew on a first name basis, with instructions for that person to forward it on to someone in their network that they thought might know the stockbroker.
Only 64 of those packages actually reached the target, with an average path length of just 5. But Derek dug a little deeper and found that, of the original packages, were sent to people already living in Boston where the target also lives and were sent to stockbrokers who shared a profession with the target, so there were really only purely random packages sent out. When Milgram looked at the letters that reached the target, he found that they had changed hands only about six times.
This finding has since been enshrined in the notion that everyone can be connected by a chain of acquaintances roughly six links long. If this small-world hypothesis is correct, it has important implications for the nature of social networks. So, my colleagues and I are conducting an Internet experiment to try to settle the matter. We now have over 50, message chains originating in countries in search of 18 targets around the world. The preliminary picture is more complicated than Milgram realized, but it looks like his main finding of six degrees is in the ballpark.
Researchers are studying networks of people, companies, boards of directors, computers, financial institutions—any system that comprises many discrete but connected components—to look for the common principles. And what we seem to be finding is that the small-world phenomenon is not only real but far more universal than anyone thought. The principles that apply to social networks, and account for the six-degrees phenomenon, seem to apply to many other kinds of networks as well. That could have implications for understanding practical problems like how ideas spread, how fads catch on, how a small initial failure can cascade throughout a large network like a power grid or a financial system—even how companies can foster internal networks to cope with crises.
The first book actually started life quite inconspicuously and then, like Razor scooters and the Blair Witch Project , it just caught on. But why? People tend to think that successful products are somehow destined to succeed because of some intrinsic combination of features that creates and sustains demand. In the case of Harry Potter , before Bloomsbury bought the rights, several other publishers rejected the manuscript. In fact, it never was a sure thing. In other words, the market for a successful product should not be thought of as existing in some latent state before the product launch waiting for the product to arrive.
Rather, it arises dynamically, driven in large part by the growing success of the product itself. In economics, this phenomenon is known as an information cascade: a social chain reaction in which increasing numbers of people buy a product principally because other people are buying it.
One objective of network science is to explain the mechanics of how these self-perpetuating markets form. That turns our traditional notions about cause and effect on their head.
0コメント