Last night, eloquently supported by my colleague William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing). My concluding summary was: • We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point in the information flows in our society: from ‘top...
From what I can see, CRM can never deliver its hoped-for benefits because of a series of intrinsic, structural flaws in the ways it gathers and uses personal data. In the new digital environment, I suspect marketers are going to have to recalibrate and redirect their customer data strategies - progressively...
So here’s the agenda for reinventing marketing I promised a while ago. First off, we need to recognise the core. Organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these individuals can provide for themselves. This...
If you had to answer the question ‘where is the natural home for knowledge about the customer?’ what would you answer? OK. This is a bit simplistic but it’s also fundamental. The natural home for knowledge about supply is the supplier, and the natural home for knowledge about customers is … the customer...
There’s another interesting thing about the book buying data example I talked about in my last blog : by definition, the information you need to get insight into your customer’s overall book buying activities can never be generated via the transactions between your customer and your particular company...
In my last two posts I talked about two different sources of volunteered personal information: ‘ my head ’ (e.g. my future purchasing plans, my attitudes or beliefs) and ‘the things I do’, which are now increasingly captured via my digital slug trail . The slug trail is important because it creates a...
My last post on Volunteered Personal Information only told half the story. It focused on the information individuals could actively volunteer, if they wanted to. The other half is the information we generate automatically, whether we like it or not. Back in the industrial age, the customer was a stranger...
OK, rant about marketing fads over. The point I’m really trying to make is that online social networking is just one small sub-set of a vast new continent of possibility: Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). It’s the big picture of VPI, not just one small part, that marketers need to get to grips...
From my research into Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) I think it is, for most marketers, most of the time. I wrote about VPI in Marketing Magazine last week. The underlying observation is that individuals are increasingly using digital/Internet devices to manage/support all aspects of their lives...
When I was writing my Marketing Magazine article on Volunteered Personal Information I tried as hard as I could to avoid the dreaded ‘P’ word – ‘paradigm’. But in the end I couldn’t because, ultimately, that’s what we are talking about: a paradigm change. Look at any marketing theory or any marketing...
