Posts Tagged ‘customer data’

June 28th, 2010

Marketing data analysis gets you closer to customers

Smart data analysis can be a major source of campaign insight and even competitive advantage for brands and advertisers. The customer data owned by a brand advertiser can reveal

  • Exactly who buys a given product or service
  • Detailed information about the characteristics of those buyers
  • Which other products and services they buy
  • Which product and service offers they find most attractive
  • Which buyers buy more of certain types of products
  • How you can find more buyers with the same characteristics

These data analysis techniques can be applied to all types of customer data – whether it’s for a retail business, an online business or a call centre based business. Insight from data analysis can be applied across a wide spectrum; from adding inspiration to a creative brief through to changing a company’s entire business strategy.

You may think the claim that data analysis can change the destiny of a business is rather grandiose. But I can can think of two examples of breakthrough data insight from the same category that ended up contributing millions in additional brand revenues.

Sainsbury’s  - Sainsbury’s agency AMV were tasked with increasing the then ailing retailer’s sales by £2.5bn over a three year period. A seemingly impossible challenge until viewed as a data question. The AMV team calculated that £2.5bn equated to £833m per year which in turn equated to £16m per week.  It still looked like a big number until the AMV team considered that Sainsbury’s handled 14m customer transactions per week.  Then the target equated to just £1.14 per transaction. The brief to increase sales by £833m per week could be redefined as increasing each existing transaction by just £1.14. Now the target not only looked attainable, but this data insight led to the idea that lots of small changes could make a big difference.  From this insight came the campaign idea that consumers should “Try something new today”. By asking customers to ‘try something new’ they were able to persuade customers to spend at extra £1.14 every time they shopped.

Tesco - The Tesco Clubcard is now legendary as both a customer loyalty card and a source of information about customers.  Up until the introduction of the loyalty card, many retailers didn’t know who their customers were. And if they didn’t know who they were it was difficult for them to gather the data that allowed them to understand individual customers better. With the Club Card this all changed. Tesco were able to develop individual data driven relationships with their customers.  They were able to understand customer needs better and in doing so they gained competitive advantage over their rivals.

For more information on our data analysis services please visit www.teqtonic.com

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November 26th, 2007

Is losing customer data the only way to raise its profile?


So, a copy of the entire UK Child Benefit recipient database has gone missing. If you haven’t heard the story, a junior government employee is alleged to have put the entire database of 7 million families receiving the government’s Child Benefit - along with their bank account details - onto two CDs and somehow they’ve got lost in the post. They don’t appear to be at the location they were sent from, nor at the location they were sent to and not in the hands of the courier company who is supposed to have carried them.

It doesn’t surprise me that this has happened. Some might say it was bound to happen sooner or later. But this wasn’t the first time a database has gone missing and it certainly won’t be the last. Moreover, it’s certainly not the first time an organisation has unwittingly compromised the security of individuals on whom it holds sensitive personal data. In February of this year the Nationwide Building Society was fined £980,000 after a laptop containing 11m customer names was stolen from an employees home.

In my view, data is still a word that has lowly status in many organisations. It’s a technical word and everything associated with it tends to sit somewhere between the IT department and the Post Room - you know, that messy corner of the company where people get in at 7.30am and go home at 4.00pm. As a result, data is not a big topic of discussion in board rooms, unless of course, it gets lost. And that’s because someone does some digging and finds out that companies have a legal duty under the Data protection Act 1988 to look after it very carefully.

The Seventh principle of the Data Protection Act is the area that all companies and organisations should be highly familiar with. It states that “Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.” I wonder just how many MD’s, Marketing Directors or government ministers would be tongue-tied if you asked them to quote the Seventh Principle of the Data Protection Act?

Now we are in the Information Age, managers of all organisations should be fully aware of two things; First, they have specific responsibilities for customer data under the 1988 Act and second, that ignorance of the law is no defence. Data is serious stuff; it should be a board room topic not least because that’s where the buck has to stop when it gets lost.

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