Data Miner or Renaissance Person?
When I read “Panning for Gold: Building the Right Database System Is Essential to Getting the Big Payoff” in the November issue of 1to1, it raised a question in my mind.
Actually, it’s not so much a question as it is a plea. As we enter the 21st century, could we please stop using analogies referring back to the end of the 19th century to explain the relatively simple, mundane goals of direct, interactive, database-driven, relationship-building, one-to-one marketing?
In the 1980s, direct marketing gurus began their presentations by taking us back to the good old days of the general store. You know the drill – the old codger behind the counter knew your great-grandparents by name, knew what they wanted and knew what new stuff to push.
This warm, familiar scenario was to be replaced, according to the gurus, by the marketing database. It would perform a similar function to the old codger’s memory, provided the database contained all past purchase information and the users obtained the tools and skills required to interpret and make sense of all this data.
Of course, our marketing databases could store anything and everything we could load into them. But making sense of all of the data and getting access to the really critical pieces of information proved to be harder than expected. Not impossible, but difficult…to steal a line from “Godfather II.” So, in the late ’80s and early ’90s – while there were lots of successes – there were also lots of disappointments and some pretty big failures.
What happened next? What did the gurus recommend? As best I can make out from Alex Hamilton’s article and my own recollection of the period, two things happened. First, since data access was part of the problem due to the sizes of the databases being built, the only logical recommendation was make the databases even larger! Forget the idea of a simple file containing only information of interest to marketing people. Instead, the trend was to build huge data warehouses that contained information of interest to everyone in the firm. Then, because now there would be absolutely no way to efficiently access all of this information, data marts were built so everyone in the organization could get to the information they needed. If you were a marketing person (and if you were lucky), one of these data marts would contain the information originally in your marketing database…getting you back to exactly where you were before the data warehouse was built.
To accomplish the above would take about five to 10 years, during which time the gurus could figure out how to make sense of all the data available to marketers once the data marts came online. And of course, hard work – requiring skilled analysts, statisticians and long hours – couldn’t be part of the solution. The solution had to be something anyone could use provided they had the money to buy it. What’s more, the solution had to have a catchy name, a name that everyone could relate to. Back to the 19th century! Data mining and data miners! We would all be like the miners of the 1850s! Except instead of using pans and shovels and mining for gold, we would use data mining software we couldn’t possibly hope to understand to sift through our data marts and discover heretofore hidden patterns to tell us who to cross-sell to, retain or drop, and what to say to a pesky customer who might have the temerity to try and terminate their business with us. (I would call this particular data mining exercise CRM – Codgers Recall Methodology.)
To use one last cliche to attack another, there’s no free lunch. Direct marketers who invest in tools purporting to eliminate the need for thinking and hard work will be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake – the tools that exist today can be tremendously effective. But no one tool will do it all and today’s 21st century marketer needs more skills than ever before. Maybe today’s direct marketer needs to think more like a 16th century Renaissance person than a 19th century store manager.
