OverLinked

Let’s say a company is in the business of making plastic drinking cups for children. While on the surface this may sound like a trivial matter, it is not, as anyone with children knows. The right drinking cup can play a leading role in getting a child to sleep and making mealtime a relatively peaceful endeavor. Traditional customer focus groups bring a group of customers together and place two cups on the table. They ask the customers, “Which cup do you prefer?” The customer will then pick a cup. But that doesn’t mean either cup is the best cup for them. Maybe the customer needs a cup with a straw. But the company didn’t take the time to think about the customers’ life. In the absence of getting what was right, the customer picked what was available.

This is a great article about the use of focus groups to try to determine consumer preference. Sometimes, the way you ask someone a question determines their answer. It’s very hard (but essential) to step outside of the box and rethink the approach. It’s almost like you have to disregard your own product entirely, and focus on the customers “lifestyle” or “business environment” and once you have a firm grasp on that – you can overlay a product/service and find the ways it fits, and more importantly , the ways it does not fit.

This will give direction toward product enhancements and improvements that will be true steps forward in innovation.

 

 

 

 

 

The Direct Mail Advertising Industry report, published annually, contains timely and accurate industry statistics, forecasts and demographics. The report features 2009 current and 2010 forecast estimates on the size of the industry (sales, establishments, employment) for the 47 largest world countries, such as Japan, China, India, Russia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, UK, France, Germany, Italy and U.S.. The report also includes industry definition, 5-year historical trends on industry sales, establishments and employment and estimates on up to 10 sub-industries, including mailing services, mailing list services and brokers.

Great resource for those interested in the direct mail industry. I’d be interested to learn how much India is shaping up as a national market. From what I have read, the Indian market is poised to increase both due to the mix of democracy and niche social groups. This could mean that more niche communications will be desired. This could have both online and offline components that ramp up.

 

 

 

Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, puts forth a “data minimization” approach for companies arguing that the histograms you can infer from doing more basic one time analyses, is more cost effective approach to marketing.  It’s an interesting argument as it hones in on 1-to-1 marketing’s achilles heel, that of the relative ROI of 1-to-1 compared to the organizational investment required to realize this marketer’s dream.  While it’s true that 1-to-1 messaging is difficult and expensive for most companies right now, there is a greater long term disadvantage to “throwing away” historical customer purchase data.  True, credit card & billing data are a risk for an organization to house and guard, but this information can safely be stripped without having an impact on order level or purchase history.  Also, the cost and complexity of safely storing customer data is coming down greatly.  Well thought out data security policies can guard marketing & IT teams from mistakes, as long as the policy is carried out regularly (archive data offsite, secured & detached from external networks).

 

 

Think about the danger of not having access to your customer data – what if the histograms that you produced in the early part of the year, prove to be fine for a time, but you’d like to compare the effectiveness of this model against one that your team put forth.  You’d have to wait 6+ months to aggregate enough data for the second model to show itself worthy, but not if you’d have simply kept access to the data. 

 

For smaller companies, however, this may be a good option – but only if there’s a high hacking risk and lack of technology support internally.  It’s better to reduce risk at that point than to save data for a rainy day – if you don’t have a current plan of using your customer data for marketing activities in the next 6 months, then it will not likely be of use anyway.