‘Perfect Marketing’ is about being as close to your customers as possible, with an intimate knowledge of their personal needs and wants.
By Kurt Crocker, Creative Director
Drayton Bird, Crocker & Mano Sdn Bhd (DBC&M)
That definition assumes your customers actually want you to get personal and it doesn’t consider the imperfection that some customers’ needs and wants are simply none of your business. It’s a tricky line to walk.
Allow me to illustrate this conundrum with a couple of examples in the news recently.
According to a 20 June article in the NY Times, recession-challenged retail chains in the U.S. are re-thinking the way they accommodate their customers. Before the economic melt-down, nationwide stores stocked pretty much the same inventory throughout their chains.
Customer service, with the possible exception of the kindly retiree hired to say “Welcome to Wal-Mart” as you enter the store, was a relatively low priority.
Now many of these chains are getting personal.
A good case-in-point mentioned in the article was Macy’s. The U.S. retail stalwart has always catered to America’s masses but with slumping sales, the chain has initiated “My Macy’s”, an internal information-gathering exercise intended to help Macy’s merchandisers stock what consumers want at individual stores.
Each week, these merchandisers meet with sales staff who keep “consumer wants and needs” logs at the cash registers. This initiative helped solve a problem in their Salt Lake City and Pittsburg stores. Customers in those cities were not buying strapless and bare-shouldered dresses that were selling well elsewhere. Macy’s merchandisers re-stocked with more modest options, and their blushing buyers bought.
For America’s big retailers, getting personal seems to make perfect sense.
Here’s another example of getting personal. From America, again, comes news from The Washington Post of a huge battle currently in U.S. federal courts but let’s put jurisprudence aside and get to the marketing parts.
First, some background. Doctors in the U.S. are not allowed to sell prescription drugs.
They can only prescribe them (and give out an occasional sample). The logic is that if doctors directly profited from drug sales, it might be an incentive to prescribe for personal gain rather than medical necessity.
Anyway, here’s how the prescription drug data mining works. Every doctor has a DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) number as part of his or her licensing information. This number is linked to every prescription the doctor writes.
When a patient goes to any major pharmacy to fill that prescription, data – everything about the prescription transaction except patient name – is collected.
The doctor’s DEA number, the drug type and brand, when, where, how much.
That information is purchased by data mining companies and combined with prescription transactions from multiple pharmacies.
These data mining companies, aka “health information organisations”, also purchase individual physician identities from the American Medical Association (AMA). Bundling these two sets of data – doctor DEA number and prescription information – creates a single database that becomes extremely valuable to drug companies.
With this database, for example, the drug company that manufactures Brand A will know which doctors are prescribing competing Brand B. They also, by the way, will know the doctor’s name, specialty, practice site, how many prescriptions are written and when. Their sales people, called “detailers”, can precisely target their marketing efforts by individual doctor.
According to another June article in Business Week, the pharmaceutical industry insists that the data is crucial for getting the most current information about a particular drug to the doctors who are most likely to want it.
Data mining companies argue that information is also provided to serve the public good; data about “spikes” in narcotic drug prescriptions, for example, is provided to law enforcement agencies.
Here’s the rub. “Perfect Marketing” is certainly about “Getting Personal”, but then again, to have positive a value, “Getting Personal” must be defined – A definition within a definition.
The conundrum continues.