The Value of a Customer
Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 by bill brennan

The Value of a Customer

 

There is an old saying – “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is”  this saying along with “You get what you pay for” are truths many of us have had to learn the hard way.   With the new USPS mandated Move Update deadline rapidly approaching, many companies are looking at their options for purchasing NCOALink® and alternative Move Update services. 

Some NCOA vendors are offering (including Listcleanup.com) an all you can eat at one price option.   Now, shopping for the cheapest price seems like a logical solution, except when you consider the value of a customer.   Given the significant increases in NCOA volumes projected by the addition of Standard Mail in the new requirements, is it not logical that some vendors are going to have challenges in delivering on advertised turn times?    If the average mail house or lettershop’s monthly mail volume is traditionally 80% Standard Mail, then volumes for many of the NCOA providers could be quadrupling over the previous First Class volumes.  

So, when your customer calls and wants to know why their mailing went out later than promised, do you think they are going to be satisfied with the answer  - our company selected the lowest cost NCOA provider and they failed to return the file to us when promised?

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CMO Tenure
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by Mark Rees

Gone are the good old days when marketing was straight-forward and simple.  A marketing director used to be able to plan out his or her budget for the year and then spend to that budget.  The job was highly visible and seen as a major contributor to company success. However, the more hyper-connected and hyper-speed society has become, the lower the tenure of the CMO. Is this related? Some report that the average tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer today is little more than 18 months. Why is that?

I postulate that one reason for this is that marketing directors have unwittingly become myopic…siloed into a functional role. Cata1 argues that “CMO's must move away from thinking like functional executives embedded in their own siloed departments and instead think instead like operational executives." 

Another possible reason is that marketers are still marketing in silos—in multiple, individual and siloed channels without a comprehensive view of the customer's needs and interaction with the company. "Integrated Marketing" requires more complex data analysis and marketers need to catch up.

A third explanation could be because CMO’s do not fully understand that they are now, as Thomas Davenport2 says, “Competing on Analytics”. Everything, including mass media, has become measureable. Marketing is now about Business Intelligence along the full marketing continuum. Those who don’t adopt a metrics mindset, cannot optimize their companies’ marketing spend. I recently heard Hanssens3 make this point clearly.

CMO’s should be the voice of the customer, driving the company toward customer-centricity. Christensen and Raynor4 assert that “What customers really want is for you to do their jobs for them”. I agree.  Marketers must focus on the customer and must focus the entire company on the customer if they want to last.5

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1Carlos Cata, "CMOs, Stop Obsessing over the Tenure Stat." Advertising Age 79, no. 20 (2008). 
2Thomas H. Davenport, "Competing on Analytics," Harvard Business Review 84, no. 1 (2006).
3Dominique M. Hanssens, Daniel Thorpe, and Carl Finkbeiner, "Marketing When Customer Equity Matters," Harvard Business Review 86, no. 5 (2008).
4Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, "What Customers Really Want Is for You to Do Their Jobs ; to Make Innovative Products That Drive Growth, Companies Must Forget About Demographics, Product Attributes and Market Size Data, and Focus on the Specific Jobs Customers Need to Get Done," CIO 17, no. 4 (2003).
5Jennifer Rooney, "Marty Homlish Knows Why CMOs Don't Last," Advertising Age 79, no. 14 (2008).

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Marketing Paradigm Shift
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by Mark Rees

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.

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
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