Data on individual customers may be valuable, but that value can be augmented if consider the larger unit the customer belongs to.
Doing so has allowed Oracle Corp. to "significantly expand" the effectiveness of its marketing, said Todd Forsythe, Oracle’s vice president of global marketing.
Forsythe noted that a male between the ages of 35 and 60 represents one set of purchase opportunities when viewed as a single entity. But his value escalates when he is viewed in the context of a larger organization like his family or his company.
Some companies go to Oracle already knowing what technology they require to meet their needs, Forsythe said during a panel discussion at Ad:Tech. Others "know their pain but not what the solution is," he added.
It pays to recognize that pain. Oracle noticed that a lot of database administrators downloaded white papers on CRM after chief marketing officers and chief operating officers attended its seminars. In response, Oracle created a "seminar in a box" for its sales reps so they could host on-site presentations at client and prospect locations.
Kimberly Clark, which sells a variety of consumer goods, had some trouble achieving efficiencies in selling individual products, according to Brad Santeler, the company’s associate director of interactive services. But it was extremely effective at creating a community around a proble such as bedwetting.
Through a site geared toward parents, it was able to market a variety of products, including Huggies diapers, Baby Wipes and Good Nights, a product designed to alleviate the bedwetting problem.
"A lot of our products are condition based," Santeler said. "It’s hard to build that community through direct mail, [but through the online community] These people become evangelists for us."
Using the Web to stimulate retail sales runs the risk of losing the customer at the store to a competitive brand. One method of combating this is by giving consumers enough information so they don’t "defect at retail," as Allison Heisner, vice president of marketing for the Michelin Group put it.
In addition to its highly branded Web site, Michelin set up tireadvisor.com, an online resource that provided third party comparisons of its products and those of its competitors. Fine print at the bottom identified Tireadvisor as a Michelin site.
The program was a mixed success. While those customers that went through it had a much higher commitment to the brands they ultimately selected, as post-Web site visit research revealed, the site was not well promoted and did not generate the traffic that would have made it a raging success.
Michelin allowed site visitors to set up a series of criteria that guided them in their tire selection, and plans to incorporate it into the sites that it is promoting.
