Personalized communication - Is it lack of data or resolve?

The CMO council in its new global survey, "The Power of Personalization"  has some interesting pointers on potential opportunities that enterprises have in exploting this approach and strategy.

According to the survey:

• Inadequate customer data is the key obstacle facing top marketing executives in their adoption of personalized communication techniques.
• Many CMOs feel the process of developing individualized marketing messages is still largely under-utilized and under-tested.
• More than 55 percent of respondents plan to allocate 10 percent or more of their marketing budgets towards personalized communications, despite their reluctance to declare their personalization efforts successful in the past.
• Many marketers' programs have been deemed unsuccessful because of a lack of actionable customer data used in campaign planning -- as well as because of inadequate analytics used in assessing post-campaign effectiveness.
• 55.1 percent of respondents plan to increase their 2008 marketing budget allocations for personalized communications by more than 10 percent.
• 49.1 percent of respondents blamed "inadequate systems and infrastructure" for limiting personalized communication initiatives.
• "Lack of customer data and insight" and "cost and complexity" were also cited as major contributing factors by 46.2 and 43 percent of respondents, respectively.

My View: I personally believe that many marketing departments in companies are struggling with this new order of availability of customer information, left-brain marketing techniques(viz. analytics) and competency to leverage technology tools. Earlier they had to just "inform", now they need to use customer information to "interact". The traditional job roles and responsibilities need changes, as marketing departments need to have people who understand data, technology and interpret individual customer behaviour.I think marketers must learn to use simple tools, extract whatever data is available and show quick-wins rather than wait for technology infrastructure to be perfect to adopt this approach as they scale-up this kind of marketing. Also, product managers must also have under them customer information managers/ executives who could effectively lead this process. It is also important that the silos in organizations have to be brought together by the CEO to ensure information is used effectively for the enterprise rather than a particular line of business. May be new accounting methods of attributing income, because information of a line of business is used for the other, should be designed for wide adoption of such practices in enterprises.In my opinion, personalized marketing is more than just the 'intent', it is the 'intensity' that can make the needle move!    

Comments

[Krishna Mony]

You make a great point. Personalized marketing (PM) was supposed to be a palatable alternative to ever so annoying interruptive advertising. It was expected to refine segmentation and employ efficient targeting techniques to offer bespoke solutions. But did someone check what the customer got?

When I get direct mail from my bank that begins with “Dear Krishna, you’ve been our preferred customer” and then proceeds to stuff me with a personal loan at an IRR of 21%, I feel insulted. I get more, I trash them unopened. This is not PM; it’s a complete rip off. They can’t do this to a loyal customer that has multi-layer and multi-year relationship, has never taken a loan in years and enjoys a high credit score. They have all the data, all the technology. They know the customer is intelligent enough to be wealthy, financially savvy and certainly not a walk over. Still they act up and get naughty. Taking customer for granted; big mistake. It’s like getting only 50 HP output from a 500 HP engine. Who loses out in the end? I ask.

You call for `intensity' to move the needle. I say they sometimes get a little too mindlessly intense with my data. I realize this only when I get called by tele-marketers of service providers whose offerings I’ve never used. I am shocked at the level of their acquaintance with all my personal data that I know I’d given only to my bank. This is no SEO. This is downright indifference or even trivial profiteering from data peddling. How long before some crook gets to forge my signature and wipe my accounts clean? I move all my accounts in the next one hour. Again, who loses out?

Perhaps that explains why only 56% of marketers believe personalized communications out-perform mass-marketing. What of the 44% that reject this notion? I think Donovan Neale-May, ED of the CMO Council makes a great point as he says PM lags potential.