The CMO council just released a new study that suggests marketing departments are doing a woefully inadequate job at making use of customer data. Unfortunately this is NOT some type of bad April Fool’s joke. Instead, to quote from the introduction of the study they are “flying blind,” developing campaigns and marketing strategies without customer analytics to drive their decisions.
If the “flying blind” quote didn’t tip you off, this is a pretty harsh study and doesn’t pull very many punches. An article on SearchCRM.com reported Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, as saying, “It never ceases to amaze me how little marketers are drilling into customer data and extracting value from that customer data, Even the campaign spend is questionable if you haven’t done a deep dive into your customer base and profitability profiles. At the same time, you might be losing customers as fast as you’re acquiring them.”
But the numbers in the study back up the damning tone. In the executive study of the survey CMO reports that only 6 percent of marketers say hey have excellent knowledge of the customer when it comes to demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data. Meanwhile 51 percent say that they have only fair to little knowledge of their customers. And even as they recognize the issue, marketers are having trouble dealing with it. To quote from the summary, “the research demonstrates a disconnect between what marketers say they want to do and how well they are equipped to do it. For example, close to 50 percent of the respondents say they are
improving customer retention by enhancing front-line customer service, while at the same time, only 55 percent report that their customer service and support teams have access to real-time customer data.”
All this comes just a few months after network-theory scientist Duncan Watts has begun getting attention for his critique of Malcom Gladwell’s theory of social influence found in his book “The Tipping Point.” In an article by Clive Thompson on FastCompany.net Watts lays out the basis of his attack on Gladwell. His main issue? That “The Tipping Point” theory of social influence is not data driven, that it’s a theory based on what sounds right, not what actually is. I won’t try to summarize the nine page article here, but I will tell you that the critique Watts lays against Gladwell is quite powerful and has made me question the book which I read and enjoyed myself three years ago.
Obviously the issues spotted in the CMO study aren’t directly related to “The Tipping Point,” but the problem of dataless decisions and theories is a common thread that spans the two. Marketers working without a sold database could be making the same mistake Watts accuses Gladwell of–building a convient fiction instead of an effective truth.
Thankfully, after all the ego crushing criticism of standard marketing practices, the CMO study offers some concrete advice. Specifically they push the idea of data integration, insistent that sucesfulling marketers will make sure that they have one place to go to get information about all their customers, past and present, active and dormant. In a CMO press release Neale-May even goes as far as to say “Investing in integrated systems that harvest customer insight is critical to driving both marketing and business performance.”
In some ways what’s most shocking about this survey though is that most of it’s respondents are from the Internet and Technology field–the group that should be the most tech savy, and the early adopters for data integration technology. But it looks like even in the cutting edge field, marketing is still lagging.
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