IntoTheMinds consulting blog
Advice in Data & IT
Artificial intelligence: are algorithms biased by nature ?
Mar20

Artificial intelligence: are algorithms biased by nature ?

I attended a workshop at the Maastricht European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity where I met Prof. Alessandro Mantelero of Polytecnico di Torino. Prof. Mantelero is well known as a specialist in the protection of personal data, which has become a very important topic with GDPR. In his talk he was discussing among other things the biases of algorithms and highlighted the need to avoid them. Using examples from the insurance sector (smart boxes) and from...

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Retail : the role of packaging on in-store purchase decisions
Mar06

Retail : the role of packaging on in-store purchase decisions

How to drive more in-store purchases ? This is the $1m question every retailer relentlessly tries to answer. Recent scientific advances in the field of consumer behavior give us some insights on this, especially on the role of packaging. How do consumers take purchase decisions in stores ? Drivers of attention and evaluation are myriad in stores (for a review see Chandon et al. 2009). When they visit a store the least we can say is...

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Emotions detection in advertising: consumers still reluctant to give their data
Feb13

Emotions detection in advertising: consumers still reluctant to give their data

Advertisers have always been among the most creative professionals; not only on the content part but also in their use of the newest technologies to make their advertising messages more efficient. The use of eye-tracking dates back to decades, whereas billboards on streets can nowadays be equipped with technologies (sensors) to interact with pedestrians. M&C Saatchi partnered with Clear Channel and Posterscope to launch an artificial intelligence-powered poster campaign. This campaign is not new (July 2015)...

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Market research : Norwegians don’t want personnalized insurance
Feb08

Market research : Norwegians don’t want personnalized insurance

Insurance companies are getting increasingly personal and thanks to digitization they are proposing new tailor-made products. Two main applications can be found : Personalized health insurance Personalized car insurance We have explored in recent articles the different aspects of such insurances (see for instance our article on black boxes in cars, or this article on the dangers of personalized health insurances) but hadn’t reported yet on market research results regarding consumers’ expectations in this matter. It...

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More debt leads to lower customer satisfaction
Feb06

More debt leads to lower customer satisfaction

It is well known that firms in the US use mainly external financing (debt) to finance growth. It actually is believed to account for 80% of financing. Yet, this external financing puts pressure on the firms and studies have revealed the adverse consequences it represents : less investment in advertising and R&D less full-time employees, lower wages, more part-time employees inferior product and service quality With so many negative outcomes, how can customer satisfaction evolve when...

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Can Big Data become a technique to promote transparency and equity
Feb01

Can Big Data become a technique to promote transparency and equity

On this blog I often took a pessimistic look at Big Data, asking for a revolution in how firms build and use their algorithms. I called for instance for opening up the models behind recommendation algorithms and wondered whether our freedom was at stake. Today’s article will be definitely more optimistic because I met last week at the CPDP 2017 conference two speakers that delivered brilliant presentations on how Big Data can actually become a tool...

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How data vulnerability affects firms’ performance and how to remedy it
Jan23

How data vulnerability affects firms’ performance and how to remedy it

Everyone talks about privacy. But what is it really ? A recent article in French economical journal “La Tribune” built upon two recent BCG reports (here and there) on data protection and privacy to question firms’ practices around data privacy 62% of French people surveyed by BCG said companies don’t respect the private character of their data. Yet, what is privacy ? Most people will claim they know but once you scratch the surface you quickly...

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Academic research debunks the myth of filter bubbles
Jan18

Academic research debunks the myth of filter bubbles

The interest for the “Filter Bubble” phenomenon reached an all-time high after 2016 US presidential elections (see our article). The existence of filter bubble was hypothesized by Eli Pariser in 2011, yet it remains at the center of debate on his actual existence. According to Pariser the algorithms implemented to make our digital lives easier are an impediment to serendipity. According to opponents the Internet offers a limitless range of resources which increase the potential for...

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How US elections shed light on the filter bubble phenomenon
Jan16

How US elections shed light on the filter bubble phenomenon

Just do a Google search on “Filter bubble” and you’ll be surprized of the many results returned. The recent US presidential elections have shed light on this phenomenon first hypothetized by Eli Pariser in 2011, and subject to much debate (see also our upcoming article on 18 Jan 2017). Yet the facts are there. Right after the elections of 08 November 2016, the interest for “filter bubble” increased fourfold (see picture below). Interestingly a second surge...

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Market research : how news consumption is evolving
Jan11

Market research : how news consumption is evolving

You know we love market research and in this article we’d like to discuss and comment the latest results published by Reuters in their worldwide market research on news consumption and mix them with some EBU media intelligence reports to understand where medias are heading to. Market research conclusions Let’s start for once with the global conclusions : by and large TV remains the main source for news. Online sources have been increasing steadlily since 2010,...

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Customer experience better than customer satisfaction to predict loyalty
Jan09

Customer experience better than customer satisfaction to predict loyalty

We discussed recently the links between customer satisfaction, loyalty and customer experience. One of the conclusions was that, as of today, no reliable scale exists to measure customer experience. This doesn’t mean however that nothing has been done on this topic. In today’s article we’d like to briefly guide you through one of the latest instrument developped to experiment the measure of customer experience (Klaus and Maklan 2013, see full study at the end of this...

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What are the latest conclusions of academics on customer satisfaction and customer experience ?
Dec21

What are the latest conclusions of academics on customer satisfaction and customer experience ?

In the Journal of Marketing special issue ” Mapping the Boundaries of Marketing: What Needs to Be Known”, Lemon & Verhoef (2016) deliver 5 very useful conclusions on the state of customer experience and satisfaction research. These 5 conclusions, taken from the very latest top research in the field of marketing, are useful for practitioners and lead us to formulate 5 sets of recommendations. Start with service quality to measure customer experience Since there is no...

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The role of Big Data on society : EBU conference
Dec19

The role of Big Data on society : EBU conference

With fellow colleagues of EBU, I organized last week a conference entitled “Big Data and Society“at RTBF, the French-speaking public broadcasting organization of Belgium. As I wrote on EBU website, this event aimed at gathering together professionals from the broadcasting industry to reflect on the impact of Big Data, recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles on society in general, and on users’ behaviors in particular. We assembled an amazing panel of 8 speakers from 5 countries who shared...

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How novelty and serendipity improve customer satisfaction
Dec05

How novelty and serendipity improve customer satisfaction

Product recommendations have enabled E-commerce websites to become a place where mass marketing converges with niche marketing. Recommendations are pivotal in enabling less popular products to be discovered by people who are the most likely to like them : this is a long-tail strategy. There is however a dilemma to be adressed : how much of novel and unexpected products should be recommended to online visitors to enhance their satisfaction? This is the purpose of today’s...

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Facebook : how do people perceive NewsFeed curation algorithm
Sep19

Facebook : how do people perceive NewsFeed curation algorithm

Curation algorithms aren’t fundamentally different from recommendation engines (see the article we just published on the latter here). They select what you ought to see, for instance on your Facebook Newsfeeds. Two studies have addressed customers’ perception of automated curation : Rader and Gray (2015) and Eslami et al. (2015). Here are how users perceive Facebook NewsFeed’s algorithm. Are people aware of the existence of NewsFeed curation algorithm? The first striking fact is that most people...

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Pokemon Go: what does this game reveal about ourselves?
Aug24

Pokemon Go: what does this game reveal about ourselves?

Newspapers and magazines have been quick to celebrate the amazing popularity of Pokemon Go. The stock market followed quickly and Nintendo share sky rocketed as a result of an excess of enthusiasm, before investors that Nintendo was not at the origin of the Pokemon Go phenomenon. Besides the marketing and financial success we should reflect on what Pokemon Go tells us about ourselves and our Society. This may actually be the biggest lesson. Contact us for...

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Liberals share less serious content on Facebook than conservatives
Aug17

Liberals share less serious content on Facebook than conservatives

In my quest to understand how algorithms limit our freedom, my attention was caught by a piece of research published in June 2015 in Science. This research was funded by Facebook (which is an important piece of information) and aims at understanding whether Facebook’s News Feed selection algorithm limits the diversity of the information we consume on Facebook. The authors conclude that Facebook’s algorithm(s) actually expose us to more diverse opinions and contents than our natural...

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5 trends that threaten old broadcasters
May13

5 trends that threaten old broadcasters

Old-fashion medias have never been more threatened than today by new consumers’ behaviors. Television channels are certainly in the middle of the storm and must quickly adapt to consumers aged under 30. Read further to discover 5 trends that will re-shape the business models in the coming years. Trend 1: television is not King anymore Recent studies show that younger watchers between 14 and 25 prefer watching TV on a computer rather than on a TV...

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Reach the next level: embark on a PhD
Apr13

Reach the next level: embark on a PhD

My journey to the PhD level is slowly coming to an end. My private PhD defense is scheduled on June 30th. I thought it would be a good idea to use my blog to reflect on the last 6 years of work. I was inspired by Laurence Dessart’s blog, another PhD candidate I met at the Edinburgh University. Laurence holds also a blog where she uses to post advices and thoughts about her own PhD work....

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Data mining : visualize your data for better results
Mar30

Data mining : visualize your data for better results

Doing data mining can become a quickly exhausting exercise if you don’t know where you are heading to. People can easily get lost and draw erroneous conclusions. Read further and discover a tool that will change the way you manipulate and represent data. Exploratory factor analysis The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA and CFA) provide numeric ways to explore the data and to build tentative models. In the end, data mining remains a research exercise...

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International retailing of « Made in Italy » products
Mar11

International retailing of « Made in Italy » products

The results of a market research carried out in the UK and France revealed some interesting pieces of information about how brands leverage the “country of origin” dimension in the stores. This market study was presented at the International Marketing Trends Conference that took place in January 2014 in Venice and is the result of the work of 8 researchers. It starts by showing that the previously acknowledged COO (Country of Origin) dimension has been slowly...

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12 years dedicated to protecting consumers … voluntarily
Dec19

12 years dedicated to protecting consumers … voluntarily

I had the pleasure to meet two weeks ago another customer satisfaction hero, the destiny of whom was tightly linked to that of Frédéric Klotz (read his interview). The man I met is Joël Guillon, someone I’ve indirectly known for years through the complaint resolution forum he launched in 2002 : LesArnaques.com Joël is one of those knights who fights against bad companies’ practices and who shares his knowledge and his time to help other consumers....

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Serving unfair customers: here’s what you should do
Dec08

Serving unfair customers: here’s what you should do

When a customer is unsatisfied, he/she sometimes engages in an interaction with the company to obtain redress. At that point frustration may combine to dissatisfaction and result in aggressiveness and outrageous behavior on the part of the customer. Marketing specialists are unanimous to say a firm should apologize and accept the responsibility. But doing so has also consequences for the employees. How would you feel, as a service employee, if you’d have to apologize and accept...

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Retailing: fighting browsing shoppers is wrong. Here’s what you should do.
Nov21

Retailing: fighting browsing shoppers is wrong. Here’s what you should do.

Browser consumers are not new. Academic papers dating back to the 80’s are mentioning this behavior and called for researching it. posing what retailers consider being a great threat to their business. Today however they actually pose also the question of the survival of the brick-and-mortar retail sector vs. online retailing; browser consumers are visiting stores and then buying online, an option which didn’t obviously exist 30 years ago. Retailers feel threatened by what may appear...

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What are the main reasons to create a company?
Oct27

What are the main reasons to create a company?

After the post we published 2 weeks ago on why companies fail, another interesting piece of statistics published by the French National Institute for Statistics (INSEE) regards the motivations of people to start their company and how these motivations have evolved since 2006. You’ll find the complete table below (we did the translations ourselves given that those interesting statistics are unfortunately only available in French). There are a few interesting insights out of this survey.  ...

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How to effectively reduce your spending when shopping in supermarkets
Jun30

How to effectively reduce your spending when shopping in supermarkets

Today’s post is about marketing; it’s actually about in-store consumer behavior. A team of researchers recently discovered one incredible trick that effectively reduces what consumers are spending in the supermarket. Read further if you want to know what it is and apply it yourself. Supermarkets profits are driven by unplanned buying behavior You know what we mean. You have experienced it before. You’re in the supermarket and know in advance what you need to purchase. While...

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Is the Net Promoter Score a reliable measure of customer satisfaction ?
Jun16

Is the Net Promoter Score a reliable measure of customer satisfaction ?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a 1-question scale introduced by Reichheld in 2003 that aims at measuring the propensity of customers to recommend a company (the famous word-of-mouth, also called WOM). This scale has encountered a fantastic success … because it’s extremely simple and quick to apply. Imagine how wonderful this customer satisfaction measurement instrument is: you ask just one question and you know directly whether your customers are satisfied or not. Too good to...

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Do firms go bankrupt more often than before in Belgium?
Jan20

Do firms go bankrupt more often than before in Belgium?

Two weeks ago we dealt with the previsions of bankruptcies in Europe and more particularly in Belgium. We said that the number of bankruptcies will keep increasing in Belgium to reach 11500 firms’ failures by the end of 2014. This figure should however be compared to firms’ creation figures. This is what we do here. The number of bankruptcies increases … One thing is clear from the graph below, the number of bankruptcies has increased 55% between...

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The truth about business failure and bankruptcies
Dec02

The truth about business failure and bankruptcies

There are few topics in the entrepreneurship and SME world of research that are as much discussed as the failure rate of new businesses (what we call generally “startups”). Here’s the truth about it. You all have heard of alarming statistics : 50% of startups die within 2 years or even 1 year, 75% within 7 years, etc … at the same time certain people advocate that these figures are completely false and do not deserve...

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Decrypting how startups manage things
Nov29

Decrypting how startups manage things

If you work in a startup you’ll probably agree with me that there are few processes and procedures in place, that communication and customer relations are rather informal. In other words startups have a more flexible structure that allow them to do things differently –and sometimes more efficiently- than big companies. Entrepreneurship research has long identified those flexible processes. Yet I was lacking a clear definition of the mechanisms used in startups to achieve that flexibility....

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What’s hot in entrepreneurial and SME research in 2013 ?
Nov25

What’s hot in entrepreneurial and SME research in 2013 ?

I’m just back from the RENT conference on entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprises. This 27th edition took place this year at the University of Vilnius (Lithuania)a where some 200 researchers fro all over the world gathered to discuss this –hotter than ever- topic. How could entrepreneurship indeed be neglected. With more than 99% of companies in Europe being SME’s and with all the light shed on entrepreneurship by authorities (just think about the European Commission...

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How demographics maps can help your market research
Sep25

How demographics maps can help your market research

If you think about maps you’ll most probably have in your mind the image of a geographic map, depicting the borders of a country or of a group of countries. There are however numerous other types of maps that are much more interesting and that can be of great help in your market research and your business plan. Geographer Jacques Levy recently published a book where he uses 30 astonishing socio-economic maps created by Luc Guillemot,...

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The importance of unplanned buying for retailers’ profitability
Aug21

The importance of unplanned buying for retailers’ profitability

It is difficult to overstate the importance of “unplanned buying” to retailers and branded goods suppliers. As we have explained in an earlier post unplanned in-store buying behavior accounts for a major part of supermarkets profits. Actually Advertising Age has reported that consumers tend to make 70% of their brand decisions in the store! In a recent article the effects of “preshopping” factors—the overall trip goal, store-specific shopping objectives, and prior marketing exposures that the shopper...

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Measuring customer satisfaction: the practices of large corporations and SMEs in review
Jun10

Measuring customer satisfaction: the practices of large corporations and SMEs in review

Customer satisfaction measurement is a much debated topic. In this article we claim that measuring the satisfaction of its customers may not be useful for SMEs. Here’s why. For many firms the measuring their customers’ satisfaction level has become an end in itself which keeps people in the marketing department busy and has generated a whole industry dedicated to software for the design and the administration or satisfaction surveys. Given the low impact of satisfaction on...

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Pseudo scientific results lead to bad decisions: the example of spelling mistakes
May29

Pseudo scientific results lead to bad decisions: the example of spelling mistakes

My attention was recently caught by an article reposted on Linkedin by one person in my network. The article was entitled “market shares are lost due to spelling mistakes”. Wow .. when you read a title like this it’s difficult to resist the temptation of opening the hyperlink and actually read the article. The article by Alain Gerlache describes how spelling has become a skill that fewer and fewer professionals master; the author explains that spelling...

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Firms’ survival rate in free-trade zones
May10

Firms’ survival rate in free-trade zones

Eric Raoult, UMP Deputy of Seine-Saint-Denis (a region located north of Paris), submitted a report on free trade zones in July 2011 to the Minister of the City. In this report we learn among other things that the survival rate at 5 years of companies operating in free trade zones is 23.3% (for companies of the “first generation”, i.e. companies created after the first series of bills were passed to created free trade zones. Conditions were...

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