Taking full control

• Article 6 of 6
• Database Marketing, September 2006
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.6MB

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Indeed, many marketers welcome the potential benefits CDI offers. Say Synaxis’ Kay, “It puzzles me it’s not something that’s been high on the agenda. It should have been 15 years ago. At last, IT is doing something of use to marketing. It will mean data cleansing will done properly at source. It should take a shorter period of time as well.”

Bill Marjot, CMO of SmartFocus, says it’s what marketing has always dreamed of. “It’s a coming together of online and online marketing, logically, in one place. It’s going to have huge effects on marketing and have an upside in terms of ROI.”

In practice, it’s certainly fulfilling its promise in some companies. Harrods was able to unify its marketing information with its sales information from all the various store departments. It was then able to improve response rates by only targeting customers that had spent more than £25 in the store, something that has now saved it £40,000, despite having only been introduced since the start of the year.

Steve Tuck, chief strategy officer for Datanomic, notes that one of his customers, a building society that has implemented a CDI, has been able to introduce marketing processes at all customer contact points as a result. “There’s a dynamic marketing message in every customer interaction. They can even have targeted messages in branches.”

MDM brings even greater benefits according to Kalido’s Hayler. Marketing can have access to far greater information about product ranges, sales of items and other data useful to campaigns. BP, for instance, has 350 different types of master data, many of which, including price and brand data, have been tied together to improve marketing. Equally, in service organisations, it might be important for marketing to know about problems with service repairs and complaint handling, so they can employ various methods to placate and retain the customer.

The greater improvements required for the whole enterprise that will be necessary to bring about MDM will, ironically, result in less work being necessary for the CDI portion of the project as well. CDI will simply be one spoke in the MDM wheel, rather than an extensive reengineering project in itself.

That’s not to say CDI and MDM are going to be quick gains for every enterprise: if it were easy, every organisation would already have done it. Instead, organisations need to look at the cost implications of the project and to work out the process changes as well as the technology needed to implement it. That will frequently mean focusing on quick returns, which in turn makes a more piecemeal approach to MDM more likely and CDI a better first choice.

With all these considerations, though, the overwhelming issue is that there will have to be change and that the rest of the enterprise will be doing things that marketing has often had to do for itself. While often IT has involved itself in ETLs and other forms of data extraction, this has traditionally been so that marketing can then either clean the data itself using its own tools and datasets or by passing it to a third-party with greater expertise or more varied datasets.

In a CDI world, however, data cleansing will often be done at the point of contact with the customer or prospect. Large-scale extraction, cleaning and reintroduction of data back into the main database may be frowned upon or even prohibited. The kinds of loose matching and de-duping that marketing may be able to do with its own data will be completely out of the question when dealing with operational data. In short, CDI could lead to certain losses of freedom for the marketing department in terms of how it deals with data. However, not all of these losses are inevitable and some may even be beneficial.

“A lot of these decisions people will say are made for technical reasons but are really political decisions,” says Richard Kellett, head of technology strategy at SAS. Often, by using politicking within the organisation it’s possible to effectively offload the work formerly done by the marketing department to IT or another department while still maintaining control and the ability to perform additional work.

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