Koen Pauwels is a distinguished marketing professor at Northeastern University in Boston and BI Norwegian Business School. His passion for data and analytics has led him to the road of research and experiments, which have let him discover new insights in marketing productivity, metrics and social media. 

“As a kid, I loved pouring over maps, hiking through nature and playing with my compass. Just like the mission in Star Trek, I wanted to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations... but then I realized that all new lands had been explored and I turned my attention to the new worlds of science...”

Today, we can find his work in numerous marketing journals, such as Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Marketing Science and Management Science. Eager to share his insights, he has also authored a book on modeling markets and on using these insights to improve decisions: It’s not the Size of the Data, It’s How You Use it: Smarter Marketing with Analytics and Dashboards*.

“Today, I still feel a bit of that explorer in me. I get to peer into an industry and ask challenging questions, then go out and unearth the answers, to go where no marketing professor has ever gone before.”

As an active member of the advisory board of The House of Marketing, we got the opportunity to ask him some questions about data analytics and the role data takes or will take within marketing. Keeping all his insights for ourselves would have been selfish, so we are happy to share them with you!

Here is an overview of the questions we discussed with him:

• What is the positive impact of applying data analytics within marketing? What can marketers get out of it?
• Why are data analytics not used to their full potential by all companies?
• What can we learn from the experience of US marketers?
• What is the risk of marketers reaching out to tools/software too quickly, without conducting proper “analytical homework” beforehand?
• We predict that marketing attribution will represent the main challenge for marketing teams in the future. What is your opinion on this? 
• Which skills do you think marketers should have, and how will those skills evolve in the future?
• What about the situation in the US? What skills do marketers have in the US and how are the marketing teams organized there?
• What would your 5 tips for Belgian marketers be to evolve towards more evidence-based marketing (using data analytics)?

Are you interested in Koen Pauwels' answers or are you just wondering how marketing skills and teams would evolve in the future? Sign up below and receive our  3-part article series covering Professor Pauwels' insights.