Book Review – Frenemies

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? Frenemies delves into the issue targeting consumers using big data.

You’ll want to pick up a copy of the highly entertaining book, Frenemies, by Ken Auletta, who delves into the world of marketing, advertising and the people and businesses in that arena. It’s a fascinating book. Among the significant issues discussed is the incredible growth in data-driven firms and how they’re already using this data to target (in mostly positive ways) consumers and their buying habits. We highly recommend this to leaders in residential brokerage firms.

 

(Frenemies by Ken Auletta)

 

 

At the same time, we recall a book we recommended more than a dozen years ago, “Money Ball,” by Michael Lewis. In it, he talked about the use of modern data analysis to build a better baseball team and how Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta built an incredible baseball team around those data tools. What one has to note is that today, virtually every professional sports team, as well as many collegiate teams, now use data in powerful ways to better predict the performance of athletes.

It’s time for the residential brokerage industry to join the modern age and build data systems that are established on strong data sets and the tools to make use of these data sets.