This book provides an overview of the analytics tools that enable marketers to collect, analyze, and interpret data in order to guide decisions and optimize the different
components of the marketing process. These tools can be descriptive, predictive, or
prescriptive. Descriptive analytics summarizes historical information, answering
questions like What happened? When, where, and how often did it happen? Why did it
happen? Was it abnormal or typical? Predictive analytics forecasts outcomes, answering questions like What will happen if I do this? Finally, prescriptive analytics
recommends actions, and answers questions like What can I do to maximize revenue
from this? We focus mainly on descriptive and prescriptive analytics, as they are used
most frequently by marketing managers looking to change customer behaviors, not
just predict them. Toward the end of the book, we also provide some discussion of
predictive analytics in the context of artificial intelligence.