On Storks and Babies: Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments

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Lambrecht, A., & Tucker, C. (2016). On Storks and Babies: Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 8(2), 24-29

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Year

2016

Authors

Anja Lambrecht,
Catherine Tucker

Publication title

On Storks and Babies: Correlation, Causality and Field Experiments

Publication

NIM Marketing Intelligence Review

Anja Lambrecht and Catherine E. Tucker

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 causal. While it is quite obvious that storks do not bring babies, marketing relationships are usually less clear. Apparent “causalities” often fail to hold up under examination. If marketers want to be sure not to walk 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 execute. However, they need to be prepared and interpreted with great care in order to deliver meaningful and genuinely causal results that help improve marketing decisions.

Authors

Anja Lambrecht, Professor of Marketing, London Business School, England, alambrecht@london.edu
Catherine Tucker, Professor of Management Science, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, USA, cetucker@mit.edu

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