The marketing information available to us doubles every five years. Increasingly, not only will marketing organizations have more access to data, but a lot of this information will be its own internal data, rather than information being supplied by an external market research agency. In the future the successful marketing executives will be those who can quickly assimilate the plethora of incoming information about their markets and their customers, and from this information see the "big picture" and then take intelligent action. In the new Millennium, those who survive and flourish in marketing will be those who can quickly identify the 'messages' that are often hidden deep in their market and customer information. People who can see 'shapes and patterns' in data will be the ones who will successfully change and improve their organizations. The successful will be those who can quickly reject extraneous information and identify the overarching trends and themes that can be detected from different combinations of marketing evidence. Those who fail will be those who are overwhelmed with the minutia of information and are unable to get on top of what this growing mountain of marketing information is really telling them. This book provides the way forward for all marketers faced with the above challenges. It highlights the basic principles about information, acknowledging the fact that we are entering a new era that is well away from the old fashioned model of a marke