Marketing and Data Science: Together the Future is Ours

The synergistic use of computer science and marketing science techniques offers the best avenue for knowledge development and improved applications. A broad area of complementarity between the typical focus in statistics and computer science and that in marketing offers great potential. The former fields tend to focus on pattern recognition, control and prediction. Many marketing analyses embrace these directions, but also contribute by modeling structure and exploring causal relationships. Marketing has successfully combined foci from management science with foci from psychology and economics. These fields complement each other because they enable a broad spectrum of scientific approaches. Combined, they provide both understanding and practical solutions to important and relevant managerial marketing problems, and marketing science is already very successful at obtaining unique insights from big data.