Currently commercial intelligence and knowledge management are being addressed on varying levels of sophistication often usually emanating from IT departments. Instead it needs to be a key process in the definition, implementation and ongoing measurement of the commercial strategy.

Information gathering has emerged as a natural activity of the Sales Force, R&D, Purchasing and Marketing functions by nature of their regular external contacts. Until now this has been a disparate activity suffering from, on the one hand, the natural tendency to contain information within departmental boundaries - or exhibiting a reluctance to share information within the business.

E-commerce has imposed new, reduced timescales between those points in time when the relationship is measured and tested or where opportunities for collecting, verifying or qualifying information are encountered. Previously the direct marketer could anticipate when a mailing or phone call was effected and within some degree of control when a response would be generated. Access to the web has reduced this element of control. A marketer can no longer engineer when a contact may wish to encounter his message, proposition or brand, or, indeed, come across it. 

As companies move seamlessly across borders, this process will be become increasingly involved. A complex struggle will take place. Enlightened multi-national corporates may gain advantage over leaner and fitter SME's through the tactical use of information whilst empowered SME’s may outsmart those larger competitors that remain with the traditional methods.

There is a need to establish valid methods for acquiring data from customers and visitors to e-commerce websites and applying the resultant information and knowledge to drive variations in website content and appearance and to determine commercial propositions and further data acquisition. 

Customers and prospects presented with the same web pages on each visit and being expected to reactively search for relevant products and offers will soon tire of e-commerce and the marketer will lose the opportunity to develop a true relationship with their customer.

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 Similarly, a visitor to a site presented with a vast array of qualification questions would be equally turned off. Tailoring the view of the site to the visitor will mean that qualification questions can be posed on an incremental basis, to populate the database using a hierarchy of importance to drive the questionnaire.

The development of the web has coincided with the appearance of new, intuitive data analysis tools employing techniques that

provide for the delivery of  information and the definition and interpretation of patterns within that information within timeframes conducive to achieving the required dynamics.

As the knowledge culture grows so the interest in data throughout the enterprise also grows. The benefits of combining information from different departments, from different regions, even from different businesses are being realised. Software tools such as intelligent agents search for meaningful additions to the knowledge base and exploration warehouse software facilitates the analysis of extensive data sets from disparate sources right on the desktops, within hours rather than months and without the mammoth budgets normally associated with data warehouses. 

This overall concept, taking the basic principles of data driven marketing so successfully implemented in direct mail and telemarketing, aims to establish a process for creating the “back back-end” of e-commerce, its link to both internal and external marketing data- and knowledge-bases and the implementation of customer relationship management. 

Data-driven marketing of the 80s and 90s has striven for one-to-one relationships and its success has been commendable within the context of the available techniques. New concepts, tools and expertise will now deliver the vision. The existence and growth of the world-wide web and the increasing exponents of the medium have implications on both sides of the data-driven communications equation.

 On the one hand, the web provides a novel, exciting and convenient medium for delivering a message to customers and prospective customers. 

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On the other, it presents a channel for data collection that makes possible concepts that were only hypothetical in the past. 

At the beginning of the last decade we saw the introduction of data driving a variety of media beyond the traditional direct mail. For instance, computers were interfaced with telecommunications equipment to derive CTI applications to assist in the management of customer relationships, enabling call centre agents to prepare themselves for calls, access customers’ records and have repeat calls from a customer always channelled through to one agent. 

Or, data being used to drive variations in customer magazines and newsletters with such notable examples as Rover’s internationally acclaimed Catalyst Magazine, bringing lifestyle versionalisation and reader personalisation to the realm of contract publishing. 

However, in all of these cases the systems that drove them relied upon pre-selection and qualification of the data. The industry still talks about unqualified contacts as being suspects rather than prospects. The sheer wealth of information available on the web, the ability to identify and acquire it and the tools now available to manage it in all its varying formats and structures all mean that disparate data, wherever it may reside, could be made available to add qualification, enhancement or verification to a marketer’s database. 

The natural corollary to that is a keener degree of customer profiling and targeting and a greater level of personalisation of message, proposition and presentation. 

Previously, the data process was often presented as a funnel to depict a channel for information that is open to as much as possible at the top, but which needs a process of filtering and selection to be applied to that information so that the best is allowed to pass through into the business process. The downside was that controls had to be in place at the top to guard against overflow, which could mean the loss of both bad and good potential information.   

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The new information channel is less of a funnel and may be envisaged more as a wide conduit It still allows as much as possible in at the top, but there is less need for those controls since the value of the data cannot be pre-determined. Valid, but unstructured, data can be fed in from a multitude of sources, both internal and external and its value determined once any links are identified. The information can then be attributed to the records on the database and parameters to drive the relationship established.             

These new concepts also have implication on clustering and segmentation. Combinations of demographic and behavioural criteria have traditionally defined clusters. Once defined, these have been used to drive product development and marketing activity. Cluster sets or communities change their content and their direction; individuals join and leave as new information is learned about them and as the importance of the business rules inherent in the data relationships is recognised. This means that the clusters are volatile and dynamic. Their dynamism must be tracked and the changes identified in order to keep the marketing strategy and communications schedule on track.  

Marketers can find that markets for their products are dwindling, readership for their magazines is flagging and response to their once attractive offers reduced. This may not be because the product is any lower quality or the price has leapt; it can be that the community once associated with that product or marker has changed shape and has moved out of the target zone for that marketer.

These changes and new viable targets must be recognised to effect and maintain product and communications strategies. Early warning of changes in communities and individuals can be provided from constant data feeds with triggers identified to drive proposition, communication channel and delivery.

© Michael Collins, 2000-2004

Published in proceedings of the SCIP International Convention, London 2000; revised and published in Direct Marketing International, 2001 and Prolog Review, 2002. 

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