Knickers in a twist

I am annoyed. Dismayed. And even embarrassed that my fellow marketing professionals either sanctioned such practise or failed to stop this.

And the cause of this ire?

A recent e-mail communication from a significant High St brand inviting me to join their special club.... for women's knickers.

Did it not occur to someone that I am a man? Did no one realise that I might not be all that interested in women's knickers? It is not as if I have ever bought women's knickers from which they could assess my propensity to buy more pairs.

Naturally I pointed this out to the brand only to be told that ' this was a blanket e-mail which they do regularly although we do understand where you are coming from'.

And there's the rub. This brand might do brilliant TV ads but they have much to learn about CRM and database marketing.

In days of yore, when I was a lad, to write to customers cost about 40p per pack. You therefore made damn sure that you were writing to the right customer about the right thing. Anything else was a waste of money

But in this day and age when it costs fractions of a penny to send e- mails there is no real cost in carpet bombing the database without a thought to relevance.

This is wrong and ought to be banned.

But of course there is ought a cost. There is a cost to the brand and to its reputation. There is a cost of losing customers through opt outs and unsubscribes.  And of course there is the cost of unrealised lost business as a consequence.

Database marketing is not difficult-all anyone has to do is to get the right message to the right customer at the right time. Simples.

And to determine this all that is required is the information that the customer tells you about him or herself, acquired data, mixed with the data and insight derived from their behaviour and from the behaviour of similar people. Even more simples.

And of course the wit to use this understanding to direct the most appropriate message to the most appropriate people.

My pants people must have observed, or at least should have observed, that I don't buy women's pants; that the majority of men don’t buy women's pants on a regular basis; and that I am a man.

Conclusion-don’t e-mail me, and all other men who don’t buy pants on a regular basis, about women's lingerie.

I am guessing that your in-box is filled on a daily basis with irrelevant offers. It might even be the case that because it’s cheap to do your business might even be doing blanket e-mails with little thought to relevance and frequency. And the impact on the customer.

Are unsubscribes monitored? Are open and CTRs checked? What is the trend? How do they compare against industry norms? These should be known and form a crucial aspect of the campaign KPIs and its evaluation. It’s not just about sales. What else is happening?

Blanket e-mails are pants. No matter the content or the category.  And with the application of insight and intelligence, it is easily possible to make your marketing smarter.

Blankets are best kept on the bed. They have no role in marketing.

Hail to the Chief

I have a geek-like obsession with the workings of American politics. And this unhealthy obsession has left me with a great love of ‘West Wing’. I even thought ‘Lincoln’ was a great use of my time!

About a year ago I came across a profile for a man called Harper Reed.  This is someone you will probably never have heard of; a man prone to oddball pronouncements like ‘this morning is a red fang type of morning; and a man who was critically Barack Obama’s CTO or chief data scientist.

And it was because of this guy and the teams he led that Barack Obama is still America’s Commander-in-Chief.

For the past 12 months I have been following with rapt attention the work of Mr Harper and anyone wanting to develop a world class insight led marketing programmes can learn much from his work to re-elect Obama.

This man and his team raised more money from more people than anyone had ever done before, signed up more volunteers than previously and far more than his enemy, and registered more people to vote. Not too shabby then!

Most importantly they got their man elected again with 51% market share compared to his enemy’s share of 48%, no mean feat in a struggling economy and with the jobless rate touching 8%.

There isn’t enough space here to do justice to this work so for the moment I have picked out what I believe to be the three key lessons that us mere marketing mortals might learn.

Lesson #1 CRM is a strategic differentiator

Obama saw his CRM programme as a real strategic differentiator and as a result derived huge benefit at so many levels from his programme, something organisations like Tesco in the UK have done. Too often businesses use data and their so called CRM programme as tactic to drive e-mail distribution rather than placing it at the heart of their business strategy. 40% of Obama’s headquarters staff comprised data and technology geeks drawn from the data and analytical elite of Silicon Valley, academia and Fortune 500 businesses; digital and analytics sat alongside the political staffers at the top table; and analytics in particular grew 5 times over 2008 and was used to improve aspect of the campaign. How many businesses use their customer data analysed to within an inch of its life to improve and optimise their business from top to bottom?

Lesson #2 Follow the data

You won’t get anywhere without data and Obama went to great lengths to capture through his supporters’ customer journey as much data as he could lay his hands on. Data is the fuel for intelligent marketing programmes and you can never have too much. Obama gathered 4 levels of data:

·         Volunteered: data provided by his supporters

·         Borrowed: data fused from other sources like voting data; shopping patterns; etc

·         Derived: driven by observed behaviours like response to e-mails and website interest

·         Social: by linking to individuals social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn Obama    was not only able to improve the profiles of his database but also obtained access to his supporter’s networks.

This was data capture and management on an industrial scale feeding a voracious Single Customer View enabling a joined up understanding of and communication with supporters and prospects.

Lesson #3 Torture the data

Data never gives up its secrets willingly; it must be tortured to do so.

Obama may have stopped the torture of terrorist suspects but this does not extend to data which was tortured ruthlessly for insight and understanding. Few other CRM programmes have the same level of ruthlessness and ambition.

He developed predictive and propensity models that were run in real time and updated overnight; every interaction was personalised, and this just wasn’t about using the respondents name but about the content and from whom it was sent; and 18 e-mail variations were tested with just about every variable probed and dissected to optimise response including day of week, time of day, subject line, content, author and so much more besides. Impressive stuff.

It is not suggested that everyone out there managing a CRM programme has the ability or the resources to do ‘an Obama’ but we could at least learn from him and ponder what we can apply. 

A recent IBM report suggested that 40% of senior marketers saw Big Data as their ‘next biggest challenge’ but only 71% felt ready to deal with it.

For marketers genuinely wanting to turn information into intelligent insight, Barack Obama and his team are a great source of ideas and inspiration. Hopefully it won’t make you prone to oddball pronouncements but maybe they will be singing ‘Hail to the Chief’ to you’.

Drilled to bits

I think I now know where CRM is going wrong.

A week or so back I was wandering aimlessly around my local Homebase as men have a tendency to do. Loitering by a stand for Black and Decker drills, and for no apparent reason, I remembered a long forgotten marketing lesson I was once taught-Black and Decker don’t sell drills...they sell holes.

And I think that is where those who deal in, advise on or practice CRM are going wrong.

Now if at this point you have no idea what CRM is-it stands for Customer Relationship Management and is the art and science of getting the right proposition to the right customer through the right channel at the right time.

In passing I should also point out that in many sectors the consumer does not want or seek a relationship and certainly does not want to be managed. So even the term is wrong for a start and at the very least we ought to be talking about Customer Engagement. However that is a whole other story.

More importantly, for as long as I have worked in marketing, and that is a very long time, marketers have peddled the idea of CRM to our businesses based on the futile premise of one-one marketing. Consequently the history of CRM over the past 20 or so years is littered with significant investment failures in CRM systems and programmes with only a few notable and well known cases getting this investment working properly: Tesco and its Clubcard being the best and most quoted case study in this space.

But like the man who wants a perfect hole and not a drill, businesses don’t want CRM but want and need more responsive marketing which generates a higher and increasing return on marketing investment.

But for too long many of us in the profession have talked about CRM almost as if it were an end itself. We have confused the art and science of the discipline with technology and computer systems. We have over obsessed on data and analytics. And we have positioned it as a standalone panacea to business ills.

Instead the data and the analytics, the technology and the systems should be seen as part of a process which results in more responsive marketing. A process which fuses meaningful customer insight with inspired creative to deliver personalised and relevant communications which are engaging and responsive.  In other words we should see the outputs from our CRM programme as the intelligence that powers the creative look and feel and delivers it where it will be most effective.  I call this intelligent marketing.

In this world CRM is not an end in itself nor a discrete and standalone discipline but is and must be seen as part of a greater whole. And this is how it ought to position and market itself. I would love it if I never saw or heard the CRM acronym again but instead we talked about intelligent marketing.

Marketers should strike CRM from their vocabulary and focus instead on intelligent marketing; stop talking about the process and start to deliver the benefits; in other words it is about holes, not drills.

CRM RIP.

And to think that this all started because I was looking at drills in Homebase.

But what do you think? All comments welcome.