I have been thinking about Marketing Operations (nicely described by Gary Katz here) and I saw a post on Why is marketing operations so important? on Unica's blog. It contained the great phrase:
"What are the reasons for the growing workload? The most common cause we witness is related to the proliferation of addressable media, and increasingly granular segmentation being used to target audiences with these media"
This is the nub of the problem - more complexity in decision making. Then I saw this post on a 350 degree view of the customer (yes, 350) which focused on a parallel and reinforcing problem in marketing operations:
"But now that creating the 350 degree view is largely a solved problem, providing access becomes the limiting factor to organizations fully harnessing customer data to drive customer-centric marketing"
So it's more complex to make decisions and you have more and more data that your front line staff understand less and less well. Sounds like a job for enterprise decision management (EDM)! By focusing on the operational decisions in marketing (what offer to make to this customer at this time), automating them and using analytics to improve them, you can make a real difference to how your marketing operations function. Front-line staff get decision (action) recommendations not just more data, all your channels deliver a consistent answer, and your marketing strategy is reflected directly in your marketing operations. While there are many issues to be considered beyond the technology ones (Gary had another good post on this Marketing Operations: Beyond the Bits and Bytes), EDM is a great approach to apply to get control or your marketing operations.
On this topic I recently posted about how Yahoo's senior marketer tells you to use EDM (kinda) thanks to channel proliferation and real-time data, how EDM can deliver on customer centricity and on Data Mining, Predictive Analytics and Markets of 1. I should also point out that Fair Isaac partners with Unica and that I have blogged about a nice Unica White Paper and a presentation given by a colleague to a Unica conference.
Technorati Tags: 1:1, CRM, cross-channel, customer decision engine, customer decisions, customer-centric, customization, decision-centric, EDM, enterprise decision management, extreme personalization, loyalty, marketing, multi-channel, personalization, retail, the long tail
