Information Masters
- Article 1 of 77
- Information Age, November 2000
Forward thinking companies now aspire to have the same sort of informed relationship with their clientele that a corner grocer would have done a century ago.
The age of mass marketing is over, killed off by the technology which allows companies to talk to their customers as individuals or, as John McKean puts it in his book Information Masters, to “segments of one”. It means that any forward looking company today aspires to have the same sort of informed relationship with its clientele that a corner grocer would have done a century ago.
Companies want to know how the baby is doing, how your health is or whether your husband has just got a pay rise, says McKean, because each scrap of information provides a valuable selling opportunity.
Today, this information is not gathered through idle chit chat but through customer loyalty schemes and other forms of data capture that generate vast amount of information and enable companies to target their customers with relevant offers.
Yet according to McKean, executive director of the Center For Information-Based Competition, less than 5% of companies achieve the full potential of their customer relationship initiatives. The trouble is that organisations are investing in massive customer databases and networks without investing in the other elements needed to make them effective, argues McKean.
“Most firms believe that the majority of drivers of information competency are technological, while the reality is that the drivers are of a non-technological nature,” he says.
This book shows exactly how companies can engage every part of their organisation, from human resources to organisational structure, in order to succeed in such aims. Companies that manage to become Information Masters, he says, gain such competitive edge that they are able to attack their rivals without their rivals even knowing that it is happening.
This isn't an easy book and it is not even an especially pleasurable read, but anyone interested in marketing, data, information or just the bottom line will find its insights riveting and surprising.