Today’s customers perceive themselves as having unique needs and interests, and demand that businesses understand and meet those individual needs. The approach taken by companies to satisfy these customers must adapt to meet their personal, specific preferences.

It is no longer relevant or appropriate to cast a general, wide marketing net over a large crowd of potential customers in the hope that the messages will have broad appeal and therefore a strong chance of business success. Rather, companies must take a more individual approach to their customers, selling to millions in a tailored, targeted and personal manner. This new approach is becoming more widely known as left-brain marketing.

This shift from mass to micro marketing presents both opportunities and challenges to market researchers. In their effort to market to customers on a one-to-one basis, market-driven companies must quickly make the move from creative, right-brain strategies to analytical, left-brain strategies. Radical changes in media and technology are dramatically altering how companies market themselves to new and existing customers. This data-centric approach, ‘left-brain’ marketing, aims to arm organisations with tools and skills that are more quantitative, more analytical and more science rather than largely creative and artistic.

There are a number of trends that have converged and the result has been a closer link between corporate marketing and customer databases. Media has become more fragmented, which causes companies to shift from mass-market advertising to focused media buys that rely on quantitative data and analytical techniques. Corporate messages can now be tailored to the individual or household, which rewards companies that have a detailed understanding of their customer databases. Also, many of the latest media channels are interactive, which allows companies to test messages, collect additional customer data from those messages and then react immediately to the customer feedback they receive.

With audiences spread across a larger number of programmes and media types targeting them is an art in itself. The messages are still important but they are no use if they are not reaching the right people at the right time. Targeting of customers and having a strong understanding of individual preferences has never been more important than it is today. Hitting 60 per cent of a population is not likely as people tune into their own specific choice. Then the advertisements need to compete with all of the others leaping off the page and out of the screen and the task gets even harder.

It’s a vicious cycle where consumers have more choice and control over what they’re doing, so they start to avoid the advertising. Marketers respond in two ways. They either increase the amount, which is minutes per hour on television or radio, pages per book in a magazine and number of e-mails in your inbox. Or they look for new outlets-new ways to get to you-which a pessimist would call ‘polluting’ new venues.

The core competencies for left-brain marketing are the collection, management and application of customer data. Companies cannot just rely on market research, focus groups, surveys, high-level demographic trends or intuition when targeting their customers. They need an understanding of the subtle nuances of their customer bases as well as the strong trends and preferences that might exist. Their interests and hobbies, their background and aspirations are all key aspects of a customer that should be used in creating the right messages for that individual or group of individuals.

Right-brain thinkers view potential customers on a simple linear scale and this style is largely a numbers game or a great deal of generalisation and assumptions are used rather than analysing the needs and desires and acting accordingly. The database of customer information built by a company will define the boundaries of what they can achieve through their marketing activities. So how much data do you need to fully understand your customer base? As long as the data is clean, you should store as much of it as you can. There’s a tremendous appetite for data and, if a company has unlimited CPU horsepower, why wouldn’t they want to pump a thousand variables through the matrix? This way, they can uncover many correlations and some may seem really quite strange yet effective.

The smart marketers are refining their tactics to push fewer messages to a better-targeted audience. To help in this process, many companies are using business analytics software to implement these left-brain strategies, arming marketers with technology that allows them to outsmart their competition by maximising the value of their customer data. They can do this by amalgamating the vast quantities of unstructured data marketing executives face into an interactive ‘snapshot,’ for lack of a better term, providing a powerful, visually interactive data analysis tool.

For marketers, the key benefit is the ability to look at the representation of the data - such as maps and simplified graphs and charts - to quickly make decisions by drilling down into trends, patterns and relationships based on data from across the enterprise, without needing to utilise a statistician. Graphs generally reduce cognitive load (holding values in working memory, trying to remember trends, and so forth) because the visual perception system takes over some of the work (providing a structural description) resulting in higher accuracy for complex data. Using the software, marketers can analyse market segmentation to better define sales and marketing strategies, and increase the effectiveness of campaigns, promotions and sales channels.

The way in which we market to our customers is likely to continue down this route. We only have to watch the latest sci-fi films to see the route that is being taken now and where it will lead over time. The ability to follow an individual and deliver tailored, timely and appropriate messages to that person depending on the time of day and their location can only increase a company’s ability to sell to them. The power of the consumer is increasing at a pace and the smart marketers will embrace this change and capitalise on the opportunity it presents.

BIOS, May 25, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Miscellaneous