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I am heavy into marketing, and even more heavily into technology. You also might see some blog posts about modern art spring up here and there - so don't freak out.

I also blog at The Direct Marketing Voice, and throw around ideas as a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital.

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The Secret to Apple's Marketing Genius is not Marketing

This is probably the most insightful article on the brand of Apple that I've read thusfar. What it means for marketers, however, is that they need alot of help from the rest of their company to help to create a product that is in keeping with whatever their vision of a brand is. Great work from the Atlantic.:
When you hear some marketers talk about Apple, you hear about emotive benefits associated with the brand: the cool design aesthetic, the imagery in the advertising, and the sense of community evoked by seeing people you respect with Apple products. This glosses over the product's most important trait: functionality. Using an Apple product feels so natural, so intuitive, so transparent, that sometimes, even people paid to know what makes products great completely miss the cause of their addiction to Apple products. It's the natural, intuitive transparency of the technology. The superlative product experience comes from an unusual combination of human and technical understanding, and it creates the foundation of all the other positive aspects of the brand.
via theatlantic.com  

More about:  Database Marketing  Design Apple  Marketing Direct mail postcards Aesthetic

Filed under  //  aesthetic   apple   database marketing   design   emotion   marketing  
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Can Marketers Use the "Data Minimization" Approach?

Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, puts forth a "data minimization" approach for companies arguing that the histograms you can infer from doing more basic one time analyses, is more cost effective approach to marketing.  It's an interesting argument as it hones in on 1-to-1 marketing's achilles heel, that of the relative ROI of 1-to-1 compared to the organizational investment required to realize this marketer's dream.  While it's true that 1-to-1 messaging is difficult and expensive for most companies right now, there is a greater long term disadvantage to "throwing away" historical customer purchase data.  True, credit card & billing data are a risk for an organization to house and guard, but this information can safely be stripped without having an impact on order level or purchase history.  Also, the cost and complexity of safely storing customer data is coming down greatly.  Well thought out data security policies can guard marketing & IT teams from mistakes, as long as the policy is carried out regularly (archive data offsite, secured & detached from external networks).

 

 

Think about the danger of not having access to your customer data - what if the histograms that you produced in the early part of the year, prove to be fine for a time, but you'd like to compare the effectiveness of this model against one that your team put forth.  You'd have to wait 6+ months to aggregate enough data for the second model to show itself worthy, but not if you'd have simply kept access to the data. 

 

For smaller companies, however, this may be a good option - but only if there's a high hacking risk and lack of technology support internally.  It's better to reduce risk at that point than to save data for a rainy day - if you don't have a current plan of using your customer data for marketing activities in the next 6 months, then it will not likely be of use anyway.

Filed under  //  data   database marketing  
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