#84/111: R in a Nutshell

Intro

So, I read a few more technical books and asked myself how I should present them. I came to the conclusion that writing a summary and stuff isn’t really practical. Therefore I will only post a small entry with some words about the book. However, if you want to know more about a specific book and don’t find enough stuff about it online, you can ask me about it.

The book

I looked for a nice intro to R because the official documentations is a bit too meta. What I found is this book which is a great reference and introduction to R. Joseph Adler covers the whole bandwidth of topics from data cleansing to analysis and graphics. He even covers 3th party packages for bioinformatics. However, if you don’t have a clue about statistics you should firstly read some books about it. This book doesn’t cover any proofs or derivations of statistical methods. All in all a pretty nice book which doesn’t have any serious flaws.

#77/111: Hitting The Sweet Spot

What is it about?

Why can you convince your parents so easily? Because you know them. You know what they want, who they are and what they value. If you could know your customers as good as your parents, you could create astonishing advertising.

What can I learn?

Hard data first: The first step is to learn about the market in general. Read statistics about the person’s sociodemographic, read trade publications and websites about the market. This should help you to get a big picture about the market and its needs.

Understand your customer: The next step is to actually understand them. A good way is to live like one and talk to others in the same segment. You want to really understand them, i.e. you don’t ask “do you prefer product X over Y?”. You should ask what their goals in life are, whether they prefer freedom over security and what they would do if they don’t have to work. You want insights not just facts.

Connect your customers and your brand: To hit the sweet spot you have to connect your brand/product with the customer insight. A nice example is Harley-Davidson. The customers want freedom, they want to be different and non-boring. Harley-Davidson offers exactly this. They embody these values and that leads to astonishing loyalty among their buyers.

Conclusion

Hitting The Sweet Spot by Lisa Fortini-Campbell is pretty nice. It’s short, concise and full of examples. About the last 100 pages are examples of people using the methods described in this book. I can only recommend reading this book because you are deepening your understanding of successful marketing campaigns. Recommendation.

The Numerati – Maths is everywhere

You buy things on amazon, search for latest news on Google and write a new blog post on blogspot. These companies are highly delighted when you do this. Not only because you bought a product or clicked on an ad but also they can gather information about you.

Today information is a very important product. Many companies exist only because of this information flood. But why? Why was information not so important hundred years ago?
Stephan Baker gets to the bottom of this change. He investigates several different areas of your daily life and the importance of the Numerati. In The Numerati he shows what people are doing with this data. How they construct mathematical models of customers and electors and why you’re maybe a Right Click if you own a fast broadband connection.

It’s not a textbook but nevertheless very interesting. Anyone who wants to know what you can do with people’s data should read this book. It’s short and stimulative.

unveiling the beauty of statistics

Really great presentation about visualizing data!

More information on gapminder.org.