Despite the dark cloud over the financial markets, it's an exciting time to attend the November 18-20 Bank Administration Institute (BAI) conference in Orlando.  World markets have been in a tailspin, a wide assortment of industry acquisitions, bailouts and bankruptcies are in abundance, while the consumer lending crisis seems to be at the center of an economic firestorm. Attendees will be eager to hear Colin Powell's comments, as well as an impressive array of other speakers ranging from George Stephanopoulos to Arkadi Kuhlmann (President/CEO of ING Direct) to Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company.  

Conclusive Marketing will exhibiting at the show highlighting our data management, data intelligence and data delivery proficiencies, alongside MicroStrategy, our chosen vendor for business intelligence and data analysis solutions.  The timing seems ripe for the industry to respond to a very challenging marketing environment whereby there must be marketing integration to ensure that all facets of programs work together to achieve the highest possible return on investment.

Conclusive's Event Driven Marketing platform provides a compelling option for banks to identify and prioritize customers who are in the midst of anomalistic transaction behavior; while our data delivery services offers banks tightly integrated methods of ensuring that each customer meriting communication receives communication.  Our relationship with MicroStrategy adds an extra array of value added solutions for the banking industry, solutions that particularly ensure  management can attentively monitor key customer-facing metrics.

If you are out in Orlando for the show, drop by to booth 1251 and let's trade thoughts about the changes you are facing, and what the perspectives of our keynotes and colleague presenters imply for these dynamic times. 

What times we live in  ... the cover title of DIRECT magazine proclaims "Mad Money" in August 2008 and "What Downturn?" in September 2008 as Wall Street registers its first dip below 10,000 in years just a week before the October 2008 DMA Conference.

How is it that those headlines could co-mingle?  Were the circumstances related to the DIRECT articles simply darting in and out to be replaced by an economy that arrived as quick as the season's first turn in weather?  Was data on the Dow's decline misleading?  Or were there people at Wall Street or DIRECT that simply missed the story?

As practictioners of direct marketing, and particularly as experts with data analysis, we are much better positioned than our public to make sense of these paradoxical times.  We recognize that both our headlines are true -- the economic downturn is striking, but there is still room for success if we can cull through data and identify that event, that moment in time, that each consumer returns to purchase products.  

Of course our margin for error is getting smaller - a lot smaller. To be prepared for precision marketing, we need to sharpen our data management - search for new sources, perform thorough data processing to cleanse it more thoroughly, incorporate data analysis services to elevate our knowledge about consumers and generally do all we can to optimize our marketing information.

Recognizing the challenge suggested by today's headlines, the vital ingredient is to conduct integrated marketing, to link all that data management to the point in time that clean data is relevant -- the seemingly narrower and narrowing point in time that each consumers' purchasing window is actually open.  And that, dear reader, implies that marketing must evolve to event driven marketing solutions. 

Mad Money will be on display at the DMA next week when the convention center opens its Starbucks and $4 coffee stands right in front of marketers, marketers who are staring this economy straight in the face.  But the product will be right, the prospects will be thirsty and the timing will be right.  Marketers will smell the coffee and buy that event driven solution.  Now, we just need to fix that Dow ...

Imagine landing aboard an aircraft carrier at night with limited visibility and a pitching deck for the first time. Without the assistance of the Landing Signal Officer, onboard instrumentation, lots of practice on shore and an occasional peek outside the cockpit at the carrier, it would be challenging to find the carrier let alone land successfully aboard the ship.

Why wouldn't you use all the tools available to you to acquire, cross-sell and retain your most profitable customers? An integrated marketing solution from Conclusive Marketing represents a practical approach to upgrading your traditional marketing program by incorporating analytics, business rules and customer preferences. The Armed Forces provide the best aircraft, training systems and instructors to ensure that pilots learn from each flight and improve their mission readiness. Learning from each marketing event can also help you determine the best message and channel by which to reach your existing customers and prospective customers while improving your marketing ROI.

Are you are constantly challenged to build enduring relationships with your customers in a very competitive landscape? Organizations that continue to grow during these challenging times have built a core base of customers and differentiate themselves from their competitors by superior customer service and an effective integrated marketing solution. Increasing customer retention by 5% can improve your profitability by 30%!  Unfortunately, attrition can be even more damaging to profitability since it is significantly more costly to acquire a profitable new customer than it is to retain an existing customer. 

Don't fly solo as you evaluate the options to achieving your marketing objectives. As you evaluate technology and integrated marketing solutions, fly with a Top Gun. Consider an Integrated Marketing Solution from Conclusive Marketing as you look at your options for the rest of 2008 and start your planning for 2009.

Marketing has undergone a paradigm shift. New tools, new technologies, new approaches and new data have opened marketers’ eyes that there is indeed a cause and effect and predictability in customer’s actions. It is discernable in the marketing data, as Davenport notes: “Most business functions, even those, like marketing, that have historically depended on art rather than science—can be improved with sophisticated quantitative techniques.” ¹ In a paper, “CRM from ‘art to science’” Jackson² sets forth a new framework for treating marketing as a science:

Early research and methods concerning customer relationship work often focus on more intuitive approaches to customer management. Many of the initial theories, such as one to one marketing and value-based management, were less analytical in their approach. Likewise, too often companies that have implemented customer relationship management (CRM) systems have done so with an unstructured approach (art) as opposed to a structured and by-the-numbers approach (science).

 
Historically, marketing is known as a social science, rooted in psychology and sociology. However, as has been recently discovered, customer behavior is actually quite quantitatively predictive:

Marketing…has always been tough to quantify because it is rooted in psychology. But now consumer products companies can hone their market research using multiattribute utility theory–a tool for understanding and predicting consumer behaviors and decisions. Similarly, the advertising industry is adopting econometricsstatistical techniques for measuring the lift provided by different ads and promotions over time.³

It is only recently that the marketers have discovered new data mining methods which are proving to be highly robust and reliable. “Over the last 10 years, a paradigm shift has occurred in the statistical analysis of marketing data.” ⁴

At the same time, consumers themselves have undergone their own paradigm shift…from being marketed to, to taking control of what messages they hear, when they hear them and what channels of communication that companies are able to use to communicate with them.“ The consumer is deluged with messages. The average consumer sees about one million marketing messages a year-about 3,000 a day. One trip to the supermarket alone can expose you to more than 10,000 marketing messages!” ⁵Customers will no longer tolerate this mass media or mass customization approach. Customers are individuals, not transactions or demographics. "Customers are demanding that marketers communicate when and how it is convenient for them. Underlying right-time marketing are analytic and predictive capabilities that determine the optimal interaction strategies, automation and incorporation of repeatable best practices” ⁶

One of the key shifts that has occurred is the need to treat customers as individuals and not as segments or clusters: “Successful direct marketing initiatives require firms to predict the behavior of specific individuals.” ⁷

Today’s managers are very interested in predicting the future purchasing patterns of their customers. Faced with a database containing information on the frequency and timing of transactions for a list of customers, it is natural to try to make forecasts about future purchasing.These projections often range from aggregate sales trajectories (e.g., for the next 52 weeks), to individual-level conditional expectations (i.e., the best guess about a particular customer's future purchasing, given information about his past behavior). There is a great deal of interest, among marketing practitioners and academics alike, in developing models to accomplish these tasks.

A new approach to customer data analysis is needed. Customers must be analyzed and treated as individuals.Today it is possible to analyze individual customer behavior and act on it with custom marketing materials, with the right message at the right time. It is intuitively obvious: “The secret to achieving a good marketing ROI is simple: Give customers more of what they truly want and less of what they don’t.”⁹With marketing data analytics and business intelligence, we can figure out what this is and optimize for it.

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¹ Thomas H. Davenport, "Competing on Analytics," Harvard Business Review 84, no. 1 (2006).

² Tyrone W. Jackson, "CRM: From 'Art to Science'," Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management 13, no. 1 (2005).

³ Davenport, "Competing on Analytics."

⁴ Greg M. Allenby, David G. Bakken, and Peter E. Rossi, "The HB Revolution," Marketing Research 16, no. 2 (2004).

⁵ Seth Godin, Permission Marketing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

⁶Dan Goldstein and Yuchun Lee, "The Rise of Right-Time Marketing," Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management 12, no. 3 (2005).

⁷ Greg M. Allenby, Robert P. Leone, and Lichung Jen, "A Dynamic Model of Purchase Timing with Application to Direct Marketing," Journal of the American Statistical Association 94, no. 336 (1999).

⁸ Peter S. Fader, Bruce G. S. Hardie, and Ka Lok Lee, ""Counting Your Customers" The Easy Way: An Alternative to the Pareto/NBD Model," Marketing Science 24, no. 2 (2005).

⁹ V. Kumar, Rajkumar Venkatesan, and Werner Reinartz, "Knowing What to Sell, When, and to Whom," Harvard Business Review 84, no. 3 (2006

Not only is fly-fishing on a beautiful, cold water stream relaxing, it is the challenge of imitating nature in it's most pure form that makes me feel alive. Stealthily entering the water you envision the fish in their gin clear world, facing upstream, patiently waiting for the almost invisible aquatic insect to catch their attention. The reaction so sudden, yet so cautious, if you blink you have missed the moment; the opportunity. Imitating the natural environment with a perfect presentation, tremendous focus and the willingness to try variations; different flies, angles, tippets and times of day all make the sport so rewarding when finally you feel the fish on your line. You have succeeded despite the noise of others enjoying the river in their own way, splashing and thrashing, throwing rocks, hitting canoes with paddles...sometimes seeming like they do not care that they are creating havoc for the river residents.

 

Producing Marketing ROI holds the same challenge for me, both the art and the science of direct marketing must combine perfectly to create the opportunity to generate leads, acquire and retain business and ultimately ROI. The marketer, like the fly-fisherman, is faced with environmental factors that can determine the outcome despite a perfect presentation. Customers can be spooked by the economy, by their unique personal situation or even by disruptive competitive practices that create noise that mask the well-designed and timed marketing communication, to the perfect database, you have so carefully delivered.

 

So how can the marketer evolve campaigns to create a higher probability of success? Just like in fishing, one must discover the most fertile waters (data and business intelligence) and then deliver a consistent, relevant and timely message that cuts through the noise and restores the natural order. The marketer must enjoy the refinement of all aspects of the marketing continuum in order to be successful. The variables and iterations are endless; therefore the supporting tools and solutions must be just as robust. Think of Conclusive Marketing as your "Marketing Outfitter," providing unique marketing solutions that allow you to consistently capture the attention of the finicky consumer.

Sophisticated new automated marketing systems designed by Conclusive aspire to reflect the highest form of marketing prowess—selecting and executing communications for customers as if your best sales representative was always there. 

That description (as if your best representative were there) might sound a bit "Back to the Future," but think about it—advertising and marketing departments have for years sought to present the best marketing communiciations possible to their customers, but have historically issued a relatively small number of messages and imagery in their communications in order to be realistically economic. For years we've recognized that type of communication strategy was suboptimal, if only because one or a small number of communications could never speak adequately, much less optimally, to all the members of a large customer base. To communicate most effectively with a customer base, one would have to be prepared with a nearly limitless set of communication options for each individual consumer. It would be as if [indeed] your best sales representative(s) was on the virtual showfloor greeting each customer, selecting their messages according to the very wide set of factors that might be influencing each of those customers' choices.

What might the "best" sales representatives be looking for? Well, they'd be observing each consumer as they enter the store, recognizing how they dress, what they drive, whether they had children at their side . . . they'd notice what seemed to interest each consumer and they'd align their own efforts to sell the store products that most closely matched the combination of the consumer's interest and situation (i.e. factors that might lead them away from their initial interest, such as what they wore, what they drove, and those children . . . ). Frankly this is how the best sales and marketing departments operated a century ago—they just had no scaleability to apply their "best practices" to more than a consumer or two at a time!

So advertising and marketing evolved to determine central messages that could appeal more economically to larger numbers of consumers. Hence mass marketing flourished. The trouble was, that evolution brought the messages further and further from each individual consumers' interest. Now with the emergence of deep databases and technology that position us to more elegantly overcome marketing's "scale" issues, its time to evolve back!—back toward "human" marketing that lets us conduct careful and thoughtful custom communications for  thousands upon thousands upon thousands of individual customers as if we were meeting each individually on our virtual showfloor.

What is Conclusive's plan for this marketing future? The key is structuring marketing solutions to simulate human practices—leveraging any and all knowledge known to the marketeer, building "rules" that can determine the most appropriate communications to issue each consumer based on their interactions with us, and enslaving technologies that can execute those predetermined communications automatically when customer interactions are detected. Conclusive have meaningful assets in all these areas and has begun building an as-yet-to-be-named next generation solution that captures the essence of the "best" salesperson in a scaleable marketing automation platform. 

On our website, we call the ingredients Data Management, Data Intelligence and Data Delivery. Together, it can also be called Event Driven Marketing, Knowledge-based Marketing or Interaction-based Marketing. Funny though, to me (despite all the new terms) all this sounds so old as to be new.