PNT Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Tony Coretto offers tips on improving profitability by leveraging your customer data
Posts Tagged ‘Database Marketing’
10 Database Marketing Tips
Monday, April 19th, 2010Email Marketing Tips: Building a Quality Email Marketing Database
Sunday, February 21st, 2010www.fathomseo.com – Find out how to build a large – yet refined – email marketing database. Email marketing tips like using “double opt-in” and partnering with a lead generation vendor will help you stay out of spam results. Fathom seo’s Joe Soltis hands out some email marketing tips on building a quality email marketing database. To learn more about Fathom seo’s email marketing services, visit www.fathomseo.com
Marketing Agencies: What You Need To Know
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009The aim of marketing agencies is to help the business take its product or service to the customer. In other words, the marketing agency eases the process of marketing that is so crucial for any business.
A marketing agency has a lot of work to do. These agencies are responsible for research and analysis to identify the target customer base for a business and then try through various exercises to turn them into clients. They also work on ways to retain the clients while extending further development of contacts with them. However, the principal role that marketing agencies play involves increasing the turnover rate and also the average statistical purchase value while keeping the target addressees well informed about new products, services, etc.
What Do Marketing Agencies Do To Be Effective
To achieve the tasks effectively, marketing agencies adopt several means including using Direct Mail, Telemarketing, Database Marketing, List-Broking, Unaddressed mail, BTL-Event support, Client/Customer Loyalty Program and Web Marketing. Marketing agencies also oversee the advertisement channels that include promotion through television, radio and newspapers. And also ‘point of sale’ advertising.
While Direct Mail is a personally addressed mail sent by post that is mostly self-explanatory, providing the information about a product or service along with ad matter in the form of glossy printed text with or without images, Telemarketing on the other hand is done through the telephone. However, Telemarketing may not always be a direct sale, it may provide the client’s credibility in producing goods that are beneficial to consumption or use.
Database marketing is more or less a kind of tailored marketing where the marketing agency creates the database, keeping in mind the client’s targeted audience. For example, creation of a database of pork eating communities in Brooklyn will prove futile to a client selling canned vegetable products. Database marketing is important because it helps the business reach out to the existing customer by first creating a list, which is a great starting point.
Some marketing agencies act as List-broker as the intermediary in the lease of databases (personal data as well as juridical data) created by their owners under the current law of the particular state and help a client to deal with it.
There is nothing funny about unaddressed mail. We all get scores of them dumped into our mail-boxes everyday, un-addressed and unsolicited. But their effectiveness is fairly good, at least among those people who do not get these many mailers. Leaflets, brochures and promotional matters received through the mail-box sometimes make the kid go for a breakfast food that others detest. In any case, these flashy fliers often stir up tempests in tea cup on the breakfast table. And here is its efficacy to raise controversy to raise interest.
Marketing agencies are today doing an extremely important work. But sometimes the work done by them crosses path with the advertising agency and the in-house marketing department of a big business house. In many cases, while the job of the advertising agency is to advertise, the role of the marketing agency is wider. That is because advertising is just a small part of marketing, which is a bigger subject.
Marketing Concepts and Techniques Challenged
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009In order to appraise the new ideas in marketing and particularly in the areas of consumer behaviour and marketing communications, one should initially outline some challenges faced by a number of fundamental marketing concepts as well as by the marketing as a discipline. Micro-marketing, maxi-marketing, database marketing, new marketing, wrap-around marketing, value-added marketing, relationship marketing and neo-marketing are but a few variations of today’s marketing. The very fact that there are so many offshoots is explanative of the eventual disintegration of the science marketing as we know it from the Kotler’s books.
The major marketing concept of customer orientation still seems to be a valid reference point. In the contemporary over-informed, over-stressed and hedonistic consumer society the customer is the one who decides to purchase a product, to be loyal to a brand or to switch to a competitor. We may agree, therefore, that “the need for such a [customer] focus has not changed” (Holland and Baker, 2001:44). The exchange value concept, however, might have been rendered obsolete by the “postmodern manoeuvre in marketing and consumer research” (Brown, in Baker, 2003:25). Let us assume that value may be created “during consumption, in sign-value” and not in “exchange-value, as modern economists claimed” (Baudrillard, in Firat and Venkatesh, 1993:235). In such a way the emphasis is on the customer’s personal experience and on the view, that “the value of consumption comes from the consumer experience” (Addis and Podesta, 2005:404).
According to the traditional theory, consumers are identified, targeted and acquired through a set of strategic tools such as segmentation, targeting and positioning. Different techniques and approaches based on statistical, “psychological, sociological, and economic principles and models” (Addis and Podesta, 2005:389) have been employed in service of these concepts. While these techniques are still in use, a number of processes and mainly the fragmentation of markets will gradually render the traditional bases of segmentation (demographics and psychographics) questionable and “even the more recent typologies” like VALS will be “less and less useful” (Firat and Shultz II, 1997:196).
Additional challenges faced by marketing research specialists poses the fact that “within the field of qualitative research it is widely recognised that there is no single uniform manner for representing consumer experiences” in postmodern, consumer society (Goulding, 2003:152). The typical roles of researcher and respondent have also changed and the research process is characterised by increased collaboration. Furthermore, the Internet demands that researchers adjust to the new forms of communication by adopting new methods such as “lurking”, “online community”, “netnography” and others (Cova and Pace, 2006:1092).
As a result, in today’s fragmented markets reality where “segments are breaking up into individual customers” (Firat and Shultz II, 1997:196), “the modern tools of sociological analysis” become outdated (Cova 1996:19). While quantitative research is still widely in use, an array of qualitative techniques are been preferred to “fill the gap” in the knowledge about the postmodern consumer. Among the most frequently mentioned are ethnography, fiction, discourse analysis, personal introspection, and in-depth interviewing (Addis and Podesta, 2005:406).
Since purchases, branding and communications are all moving online, scholars have begun defining the Internet Marketing Segmentation (IMS). One such definition follows:
“IMS is the use of current information technology to classify potential or actual online customers into groups in which the consumers have similar requirements and characteristics” (Lin et al., 2004:602).
Definitions of that sort, alluring as they may look, are simply old concepts in new clothes and some make-up. More important is that new approaches like online ethnography, or netnography are being increasingly used as appropriate research methods (Cova and Pace, 2006; Maclaran and Catterall, 2002). Companies would need to resort to guerrilla tactics and employ people proficient in areas such as online community engineering. Phenomena like brand hijack (Cova and Pace, 2006:1094) and decisions on how much power should be given to consumers will eventually speed up the trends that shape contemporary research.
The marketing communication concepts of mass marketing and mass advertising have also been a subject to considerable revision. The so-called mass customisation has been boosted by the use of email marketing, database marketing, RSS and others. The processes of fragmentation and post-consolidation have given birth to new concepts like tribal marketing (Cova, 1996:21). Mass advertising and the one-to-many, one-way linear communications have given way to one-to-one, many-to-many, two-way, non-linear communication flow (Holt, 2002; Maclaran and Catterall, 2002). The Internet has brought also the idea of suck as opposed to the traditional push and pull (Travis, 2001:16). The levels of interactivity have changed “the nature of advertising from persuasion to relationships” (Philport and Arbittier, 1997:75) and the efficacy of advertising itself has been questioned. The title of the article “Stop Advertising – Start Staging Marketing Experiences” by Pine II and Gilmore (Strategic Horizons LLP, accessed 10th January 2009) is self-explanatory.
Schmitt (1999:53) argues that three trends in the broad commercial environment have caused a paradigm shift from traditional “features-and-benefits” marketing toward “experiential marketing”:
- The omnipresence of information technology;
- The supremacy of the brand;
- The ubiquity of communications and entertainment.
While agreeing with Schmitt’s ideas I would also add to the frame the influence of postmodern consumer behaviour. Therefore, reference points for future research are:
- Postmodern condition;
- Experiential marketing;
- Internet as a new branding tool;
- Customer-based brand equity.
Addis, M. and Podesta, S. (2005). Long Life to Marketing Research: A Postmodern View, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 39. No. 3/4, pp. 386-412.
Brown, S. (2003). Postmodern Marketing: Everything Must Go!, in Baker, M. (ed.), Marketing Book, Oxford: Buterworth-Heinemann, 2005, pp. 16-31.
Cova, B. (1996). The Postmodern Explained to Managers: Implications for Marketing, Business Horizons, Vol. 39. No. 6, pp. 15-23.
Cova, B. and Pace, S. (2006). Brand Community of Convenience Products: New Forms of Customer Empowerment – The Case “my Nutella The Community”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 40, No. 9/10, pp. 1087-1105.
Firat, F. and Shultz II, C.J. (1997). From Segmentation to Fragmentation: Markets And Marketing Strategy In The Postmodern Era, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31. No. 3/4, pp. 183-207.
Firat, A.F. and Venkatesh, A. (1993). Postmodernity: The Age of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 227-249.
Holland, J. and Baker, S.M. (2001). Customer Participation In Creating Site Brand Loyalty, Journal Of Interactive Marketing, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 34-45.
Holt, D.B. (2002). Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 29. No. 1, pp. 70-90.
Goulding, C. (2003). Issues in Representing the Postmodern Consumer, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 152-159.
Lin, T.M.Y., Luarn, P. and Lo, P.K.Y. (2004). Internet Market Segmentation – An Exploratory Study of Critical Success Factors, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 601-622.
Maclaran, P. and Catterall, M. (2002). Researching The Social Web: Marketing Information From Virtual Communities, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 319-326.
Philport, J.C. and Arbitter, J. (1997). Advertising: Brand Communication Styles in Established Media and the Internet, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 37 No.2, pp. 68-77.
Strategic Horizons LLP, ‘Stop Advertising – Start Staging Marketing Experiences’ by Pine II, B.J. and Gilmore, J. H. Online. Available at: http://directory.leadmaverick.com/Strategic-Horizons-LLP/Akron/OH/10/943/index.aspx (accessed 10th January 2009).
Travis, D. (2001). Branding in the Digital Age, Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 14-18.
Schmitt, B. (1999). Experiential Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 15, No. 1-3, pp. 53-67.
Boyan Yordanof is in the tourism business since 1996. His main interests are in Internet Marketing and more specifically Branding in the Hospitality Industry. Boyan is an Internet Marketing Executive at RIU Seabank Hotel Malta
Personal URL: http://www.yordanof.com
