Shifting From Mass Marketing to Micro Marketing

Today's customers perceive themselves as having unique needs and interests, and they demand that businesses understand and meet those individual needs. To satisfy these customers, major marketers must shift from casting a wide marketing net over a vast crowd to selling to millions of individual customers.

This shift from mass to micro marketing presents both opportunities and challenges to market researchers. In their effort to market to customers on a one-to-one basis, market-driven companies must quickly make the move from creative, right-brain strategies to analytical, left-brain strategies.

For this reason, companies will increasingly rely on market research for customer attitudinal analysis. Attitudinal analysis, however, is only one aspect of customer understanding. True customer analysis requires an understanding of not only how and what customers think but also how they act.

Understanding how customers think can help explain and predict customer behavior. Conversely, customer behavior can help explain and predict customer attitudes. Ideally, behaviors and attitudes are analyzed simultaneously for deeper customer understanding.

Unfortunately, in most companies, behavioral and attitudinal analyses are conducted in isolation. Behavioral analysis is typically the domain of business intelligence or customer relationship management (CRM) and is usually tightly managed by IT. Market research and attitudinal analysis are owned by the market research department (which is typically part of a larger marketing department), and they are often outsourced to a market research agency.

This physical separation hinders interaction and cooperation between the research groups. It also suggests that two decision makers, both tasked with customer intelligence, are operating under two different sets of strategies and objectives.

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Ian Durrell is President of Market Research at SPSS Inc. (www.spss.com).