Alterian Summit Survey Pinpoints Multichannel Data Utilization as Marketers' Greatest Challenge
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
A recent survey of marketing industry leaders attending the Alterian Annual Summit revealed their most pressing challenges on four fronts — database marketing, digital marketing, operational marketing, and customer experience marketing. More than 160 executives from nearly 60 leading brand marketers, marketing service providers, systems integrators, and agencies attended the event held in August in Chicago.
Integrating channels remains the biggest hurdle, the industry leaders found.
Of the 140 survey respondents, almost 30 percent cited multichannel data analysis as their greatest source of concern. Marketing to and tracking information across multiple channels is a key challenge. Additionally, 25 percent said their biggest hurdle was "closing the loop on campaigns by merging response and transactional data." Together these two groups, which comprise nearly 53 percent of all surveyed, feel that they have data available, but do not know what to do with it.
What's more, even though marketing has evolved, organizationally it is still extremely siloed. In 33 percent of companies, separate teams continue to execute email and direct mail campaigns independently.
"Integrating what you know about your customers, across all channels, can help to build a more human relationship with your customers as real people, not just as rational consumers. Statistically, 70 percent of their decision to buy is based on how we interact with them as a person, and only 30 percent is as a consumer," explained John McKean, executive director of Center for Information Based Competition. "The Alterian survey is validation that marketers lack the ability to use data that improves the customer experience. Companies must have a consistent dialog with customers across all business functions and marketing channels in order to maintain a competitive advantage."
This is consistent with past Alterian research, which led to the development of the Alterian Marketing Services Platform, an enterprise marketing platform which enables an organization to aggregate all available data on any customer, and use that information to enrich the customer's experience.
Operational issues stand in the way of meaningful integration.
For truly customer-centric marketing to become a reality, integration must extend throughout the marketing department and beyond. When asked about their greatest overall challenge to developing more powerful relationships with consumers, 60 percent of respondents identified organizational structure and financial resources.
"We can see that marketers are facing huge executional gaps," said David Eldridge, Chief Executive Officer, Alterian. "But change has to come from the top, with a customer-focused passion that doesn't tolerate disparate processes or platforms. In a truly customer-centric culture, everyone works together toward a common goal. To do that, they need a common platform and solid partnerships from which to execute."
At the same time, leveraging consumer data can help on two fronts. Employing analytics makes marketing efforts more efficient and effective, as well as providing the proof marketers need to justify their budgets. Suresh Vittal, Forrester Research, wrote that "focus on data-driven marketing is driving widespread adoption of analytical solutions as marketers seek to improve the relevance of their messages and optimize marketing spend." (“Forecast: Global Marketing Enterprise Platforms: 2007-2013”, Forrester Research, Inc., August 2007).
Attendees at this year's Alterian Annual Think Tank Summit included executives from American Express, Kaiser Permanente, Acxiom, ARGI, Boardroom, Inc., CMS, Merkle, and others. Keynote presentations featured leaders from Forrester Research, Jupiter Research, Center for Information Based Competition, DMRS Group, KXEN and The Customer Partnership.