The New Paradigm of Direct Marketing Research: Not the Old Or the New, But a Merging of the Two‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The misuse of modeling techniques is of particular importance in contemporary marketing as more and more companies enter the world of new types of distribution channels, e.g., the Internet, while continuing to use their historically used channels. As their marketing research departments begin to collect and analyze customer-level data, many traditional researchers continue to blindly mine the tremendous amount of data available using the traditional modeling and statistical techniques they have used in the past to analyze market-level data. At the same time, those who have used and mined customer-level data have continued on in their same path, not really networking and learning from the previously more traditional marketers ... not learning and using, in particular, the more traditional statistical techniques used in mass marketing to increase the quality of the predictions of their customer-level models.