It certainly can be a powerful tool, but it just depends upon whether we can come up with actionable and targeted recommendations based upon the data. The technique can be rather elegant, but if we cannot come up with practical and understandable applications for our clients, it is not going to matter. Neural network software certainly has come a long way from its academic beginnings, allowing both nonanalytical types and statisticians to take almost any kind of data and develop some kind of trend analysis, using a process that is relatively easy and intuitive. While the software companies do not necessarily guarantee that the user will get better results with neural nets than by hiring a trained statistician, they do promise much faster and easier computations than with the traditional analytical techniques. It depends upon whether people will be using it as a faddish competitive edge or they are truly going to be using it to develop targeted, actionable recommendations.
Neural nets are like any other marketing tool.
The driver for any model, be it neurals or regression analysis, will be its successful application to real marketing problems. It was a new thing, not yet widely used. Database technology became more perfected in the 1980s, and now it has become rather mundane. In the future, you will see neural nets go through the exact same cycle.