Dicing with Danger: Using Data Insights in Your Marketing

If you've suffered through my last two blog posts (#1 here, #2 here), you've read my reasoning that while marketing data potentially can lead your business into danger, they can also provide meaningful insight.

Now what?

With insight, you can start placing bets with data.

Hit it, Frankie:

While you will never out-cool Albert Francis Sinatra, you can probably make smarter bets.  Here's how.

Get a Database and Get in the Game!

With the advent of cheaper computing and sharper tactics, CRM has risen from the ashes of the promises it made in the 1990s.  While many marketers once associated CRM with meager results and NASA-level costs, the approach's full capabilities have come to the fore, with companies such as Amazon and Tesco serving as glittering examples of success.

And therein lies the problem: fledgling CRM marketers look at these paragons of customer focus and throw their hands up.  These marketers feel frustrated because their own systems, data, content, personnel or management can't live up to the very best the industry has to offer.

Well, quit feeling sorry for yourself and try anyway.  Here's how.

Will Marketing Become Politics?

Familiarity breeds contempt.  

Nowhere does this adage seem more appropriate than in the realm of the current Presidential election.  Voters have now seen so much of President Barack Obama and of Governor Mitt Romney that they can now hate them for any number of reasons based on policy, their wives, choices of attire or hand gestures.  Moreover, their supporters and detractors seem to have fossilized into violently opposed camps.

Welcome to marketing, circa 2025.

How to Use a Subject Matter Expert

The photography world descended on Cologne, Germany last week for the biennial trade fair known as Photokina.  Sony showed off at $2,700 compact camera.  Leica, the Duesenberg of the camera world, showed off their latest and greatest wunderkamera, the M, yours for just a tick under seven grand.  Of course, you cheapskates can make do with the lowly M-E for $5,450.  And Hasselblad, purveyors of Neil Armstrong’s moon camera, previewed their latest bijou, the as-yet-unpriced Lunar.

So what did Adorama, the mighty camera emporium, feature in one of its email newsletters this week?  A oversized frisbee for $17.  And that, friends, is how you use a subject matter expert to enliven your communications.

Don’t get it?  Let’s discuss how this approach works.

How to lose a customer, by Filson

In one of my early posts, I wrote that a company could create a great brand through direct channels rather than rely on traditional brand media such as broadcast TV or print.  You can argue my point all you like, but I think we can all agree that a brand can destroy itself through direct media.

Case in point: Filson.

OK, I still want one, but still...

For those of you unfamiliar with Filson, they have made clothes since the 19th century in Seattle (predating Boeing and even Starbucks).  While they originally created clothing for Yukon gold pioneers, they quickly established themselves as a premiere American manufacturer for outdoorsmen with handsome, functional and well-built items.  I own three: a vest, a briefcase (see below) and, of course, a safari jacket.

Also, thanks to them, I have been solicited by one of the most repugnant organizations in America: the National Rifle Association.

The Unified Field Theory of Creepy

When marketers discuss using consumer data to drive content or offers in addressable communications such as email, apps or on-site messages, sooner or later the word “creepy” comes up.  Front-and-center stand such examples as the New York Times’s infamous “father learns of daughter’s pregnancy via direct mail” article.

However, even ordinary consumers in ordinary situations may feel that a marketer has violated some form of privacy when it reveals too much about what it knows in an email or SMS.

My former colleague Tim Suther used to use this image as a prime example of when marketers use data that they shouldn’t

We all agree that we want to avoid creepiness, but I don’t think we marketers, as a group, have established a working definition of creepy.  While no one would deny the creepiness of the lubricant example above, would an offer for sports equipment or kitchenware have raised an eyebrow?  How can we create a standard for what kinds of data are off-limits?  

In another dimension--time--how long can a marketer hold onto data without looking like a stalker?  I suspect that most consumers wouldn’t think twice about seeing items browsed the previous day in the “recently browsed items” column of a retail site.  However, would that customer look askance at the column if it featured something browsed a month ago?  Three months ago?  A year?

My favorite football columnist, Gregg Easterbrook, has coined the term “the Unified Field Theory of Creep” to parody the tendency of retailers to move all holidays forward, such as when Target puts out back-to-school merchandise in early July.  So I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, a Unified Field Theory of Creepy.