In Pursuit of One-to-One Marketing

Claritas in the News

Presstime Magazine
January 2007
Bruce Wilkinson

I came upon a man chasing the horizon and suggested that the faster he ran, the quicker the horizon would recede. “You lie,” he said, and ran on.

In vain, I have sought the source of this parable. But that search, much like the man chasing the horizon, echoes of the unfulfilled promise of one-to one marketing.

Much has been made of the promise that far better sales results accrue when an offer is targeted uniquely to each household or individual. The inability to bring one-to-one marketing to fruition, however, continues to frustrate marketers at many levels.

At one extreme, mass marketing offers products using the one-size-fits-all approach. At the other, one-to-one marketing relies on completely unique combinations of marketing’s venerable four P’s–Place, Price, Product and Promotion–to ensure that each customer’s needs are individually addressed.

What isn’t one-to-one marketing? Obviously, mass marketing is not. Even creating different offers for two, five or eight different customer targets is not. Both are examples of one-to-many marketing, not one-to-one.

In the real world, one-to-one marketing is that receding horizon. So the question we must ask is: How can we get closer to one-to-one marketing?

Every path that we see newspapers take to approach this nirvana starts with their internal customer data. Unlocking this information, accessing it easily, and putting it to work can transform a company.

This holds true on both the business-to-consumer side–for circulation and database marketing purposes–as well as on the business-to business side–to improve targeting and enhance ad sales revenues.

Newspapers have moved from legacy mainframe and mini-computers, with their proprietary data structures, to “open” platforms. Oracle, SQL and Sybase databases are now the norm, which facilitates marketers’ access to data. Though IT often plays a role in setting up this access, it has become increasingly common for marketers to tap into a datamart on their own without having to involve IT. This should be a goal for every newspaper.

From there, business and subscriber/nonsubscriber databases must be cleansed. This reduces duplication in the databases and increases match rates when appending other data. Do not neglect this oft-overlooked process of data hygiene; it is an ongoing requirement, not a one-time project.

As part of this process, assign a unique ID to each record in each database. Having a unique ID to which you can match a record will simplify every future process.

Once cleansed, data can now be appended to enhance your databases. Household-level demographics, business firmographics, segmentation and other data will give your newspaper the ability to analyze and group customers into relatively homogeneous subgroupings. These “target groups” become the core focus of your upcoming campaigns.

If you create four to six of these groups, you will have taken the first steps toward one-to-one marketing.

What’s next? Testing, implementation and refinement of your groups, using the results of your campaigns. But that’s a subject best left for another day.

To recap, here’s a checklist to help you get started down the road toward one-to-one marketing:

• Invest in your customer database.
• Make it accessible to marketers.
• Clean and de-duplicate data regularly.
• Enhance with household-level or individual business data.
• Develop target groups.
• Test, refine, implement, refine. Repeat.

The horizon will always recede upon chase, but one-to-one marketing need not be as elusive.

About Claritas

Since 1971, San Diego-based Claritas has been the pre-eminent source of accurate, up-to-date marketing information about people, households and businesses within any geographic area in the United States. Its target marketing services are aimed at reducing the cost of customer acquisition and growing customer value. Claritas offers industry-leading consumer segmentation systems, consulting services and software applications for site analysis, advertising sales and customer targeting. Claritas is a Nielsen company. The Nielsen Company is a world-leading information and media company that includes ACNielsen, Nielsen Media Research, Spectra Marketing Systems, and Scarborough Research, among others. To learn more about Claritas and Nielsen products and services visit their web sites at www.claritas.com and www.nielsen.com.