Database marketing connects to the Internet

Abstract

Long before the advent of the commercial Internet in the late 1990s, the concept of database marketing pushed forward a revolution in marketing. Leading marketers struggled with the implications of three key database marketing concepts: — individual, addressable customers are the central focus of marketing — customer data can be collected, analysed and then used to drive marketing — customer management should be long-term oriented. As a result, marketing processes were re-engineered, a more technical cadre of professionals joined marketing departments, software products were created and new types of service businesses emerged. This first generation of database marketing emerged when computer technology could support three important functions. — Very large-scale collection of customer data, especially transactional data, from multiple sources. Computerisation of operations reached the point where virtually every customer interaction resulted in a digital trail that could be linked to a customer master record. — Affordable retention and processing of marketing databases. Marketing databases often contain millions of customers and tens of millions of related records in order to be effective drivers of marketing programmes. To a large degree, the requirements of database marketing forced the creation of online databases in place of tape-based, offline files. — Analysis and access tools that enabled decision support and statistical modelling and targeting of marketing communications. These provided the business pay-off needed to justify investments in database building. Many experts quite appropriately called the infusion of both concepts and technology into the marketing realm ‘revolutionary’. However, by the beginning of the new millennium this revolution became an accepted, even everyday, component of corporate marketing. Given the force, speed and trajectory of today's Internet-driven changes in marketing, it might be more appropriate to call this a hyper-revolution. Whenever change happens so dramatically, it is easy get both immersed and lost in the details of what is occurring. This paper attempts to show the connections between Internet-driven changes in marketing practice and the earlier foundation of database marketing.