With Statistics Canada having been criticized in the news recently, it’s good to see some of the real applications that impact Canadian businesses and lives, such as the Canadian Internet Use Survey. But I think practitioners–and the general public–still aren’t quite fulfilling “due diligence” in either citing the Statistics Canada information or in how they [...]
Tag archives for marketing
Yvon, selon le commissariat aux langues officielles, ni CIRA ni les programmes fédéraux n'oublige qu'il ait besoin évident: http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca/html/faq2_f.php#q4 The following post was actually primarily a response to "Canadian Public Interest in Internet Policy and Decision Making" sent by CIRA in October, 2009. If it were a one-off survey conceived by someone at CIRA whose [...]
The following answer was my response to a question posed in LinkedIn Answers by Pratik Raghav: “I would like to know how strategy has been defined by high-end outlets like Starbucks.” My response was as follows. The original question, with answers from other members, can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/answers/product-management/positioning/PRM_PST/700921-78050926 Since Pratik specified “high-end,” I suspect he [...]
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” is a reference to the abuse of statistics to support a position. I feel that this cliché has, itself, been abused and resulted in the unnecessary malignment of statistics, which is actually an extremely powerful tool not only to characterize populations or phenomena, but to predict events, with known confidence (such as the application of probit models and logistic regression that take categorical or numeric predictor variables, such as age, income level, and preferences, that describe a customer segment and calculate the probability that customers will purchase a new product). I am even more dismayed at the cynicism that has come to surround statistics; whilst the cliché describes the intentional and unintentional abuse of statistics out of context or inappropriately with intent to influence rather than inform, most people–even those who have taken an introductory statistics course in university (perhaps especially those, since most people are thoroughly confused and intimidated by the subject after an introductory course)–do not have sufficient understanding of the theoretical bases for statistical techniques to see the power in them. Our world is not a deterministic place; even the most reliable process will occasionally yield unexpected results. Thus, it is vitally important that we can quantify the likelihood that an observation is truly a characteristic result of a phenomenon and state how confident we are that a given observation was not the result of random chance.
The following is my response to a LinkedIn Answers question pertaining to managerial economics and cost accounting issues surrounding pricing that can be found in its entirety, including other contributors’ answers, at http://www.linkedin.com/answers/professional-development/ethics/PRO_PET/695563-7604647 The original question, posed by Vasco Philip de Sousa, Screenwriter and Historian, was as follows: Is lowballing acceptable if your client can’t [...]
As a Canadian student in the AMDS PhD programme, Finance specialization, I have a personal interest in Walden’s success in entering the Canadian market and gaining credibility. I completed my BSc (Hons) at Carleton University in Ottawa, and my MBA from McMaster University in Hamilton. I find myself continually on the defensive when I mention [...]