What to Do With Customer Data Overload

Given the strong business pressure to improve Marketing's accountability, the race to better understand the customer is in high gear.

Data warehouse, data-mining and customer relationship management (CRM) systems promised a seamless flow of intelligence and insight to executives' fingertips. Instead, many organizations grapple with expensive software installations that are difficult to implement and even harder to use.

The end result is a far cry from improving Marketing—it is lost revenue, wasted money and a reduced ability to understand customers.

While technology can bring data and information together and make it accessible, only marketing science and customer measurement can provide the insight to directly inform the organization about who the customers are, what they are looking for, whether they are satisfied, and what would make them loyal consumers.

Last week, Roy Young identified 15 major new books on the topic of customer focus; this article looks at one of the best of these new titles in more depth.

An Overview

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Dr. Raymond Pettit is a vice-president with Longwoods International, a customer insight firm. He is working on a new book, Rethinking Advertising Effectiveness: Measuring New Media and Managing New Technologies (to be released in Fall 2005). Ray is also coauthor of Market Research in the Internet Age (John Wiley & Sons, 2002).  Contact him at erpmetro1@earthlink.net.