All Talk, No Action: DMers slow to warm up to new technologies

Nestled within a new study from the Direct Marketing Association is evidence that marketers have not fully embraced technological innovation.

Only 5% of the respondents to a joint DMA/PricewaterhouseCoopers survey said they use full-service campaign management systems, compared with 22% who use project management or productivity software. And only 19% use proprietary software.

One out of five do not use an electronic system to track their campaigns. But they do use non-electronic systems. Another 34% have no formal tracking setup.

The study also shows that companies are not fully integrating data across channels.

Only 19% said customer information is merged, while another 36% have partially linked their systems. The remaining 45% said their marketing channels were not integrated at all.

They may be trying to do this, however. One-fifth of the respondents said their companies use an enterprisewide warehouse and another 29% plan to set one up in the next year. More than 40% have functional data marts and another 25% have plans to use them.

Whether they will be exploiting the technology to its fullest remains to be seen: Only 34% of companies use data mining, and of those only 38% use advanced analytical techniques. Within the latter group, around 70% use it for campaign response reporting or customer segmentation models, while about half use it for basic statistics and 44% for RFM analysis.

The study cites Gartner Group research that 90% of the largest companies in the world will implement a data warehouse by the year 2000, and 70% of those will be dedicated to marketing and sales.

The report also shows that marketing, sales and service functions are blurring within companies. Two-thirds of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed that this was so.

It also seems true that customers are demanding uniform treatment at all points of contact. Over half of the respondents agree or strongly agree.

The report, “Customer Relationship Management: A Senior Management Guide to Technology for Creating a Customer-centric Business” blends an overview of data management techniques and technology, case studies, and original research conducted in cooperation with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The data in the joint survey was collected from 150 senior marketing executives from companies with revenue in excess of $100 million.