Corner Shops and Fighter Command
The corner shop analogy
Around the time of the early stages of the CRM boom there was an analogy,
frequently trotted out at presentations and industry events, comparing
the marketing database to a corner shop.
It goes like this: Time was businesses were small. Like the corner shop.
The man behind the counter knew his customers. He knew which brand of baked
beans were favoured by Mrs Jones, and the rate at which they got through
them. If she failed to stock up every second thursday he would remind her.
He knew the date of little Jimmy's birthday, and would lay in jelly and
party hats in good time, and draw Mrs Jones attention to these essential
supplies.
As businesses grew big, they lost this connection with the customer. there
were too many customers for anyone to be able to remember all their details,
and too many people within the business involved in each process to do
the remembering. The solution to all this was the database, capable of
remembering facts about huge numbers of customers, and presenting them
to anyone in the organisation who needed them.
The purpose of the database was to return us to the halcyon days of personal
connection, and every business would have the service levels of the corner
shop.
So whats wrong with it?
I take exception to this analogy. Not because it is based on some rosy
nostalgia for time and place that largely never was, not because it is
solely focussed on a consumer marketing world view, and completely ignores
the more complex world of business-to-business, not even because it sets
an expectation that technology can somehow substitute for real personal
attention - well alright partly because of that. After all this is the
attitude that spawned the explosive growth of the call centre, a classic
mixed blessing of modern life.
All that aside my big objection is that the corner shop analogy encourages
the view that a database is no more than a big laundry list or gigantic
card index. Which is just plain wrong.
I'd like to offer an alternative, military analogy. Which should please
marketers, just at look how many times a day we use the word campaign.
There was a time when battles were fought on flat open spaces by armies
dressed in brightly coloured uniforms moving in columns and rows. The general
would park himself on a convenient hill overlooking the battlefield and
direct operations. He had pretty much a first hand view of all that was
going on.
Now fast forward to the Battle of Britain. War in the air thousands of
feet above and many miles away from strategic commanders.
What happens, as we all know from those splendid british films, is that
you have the chaps of fighter command gathered round a huge table where
demurely glamourous Waafs in headphones collate radio reports and move
around little aeroplanes on a big table to represent the forces engaged.
To me that big table, that model of what is happening in the outside world,
constantly updated by new data feeds is the perfect anlogy for the marketing
database Why?
Well for a start it's a damn site more glamourous than that corner shop
stuff, and being an Information Anorak who believes that doing stuff with
data is the most fun you can have (at work), I see database marketing as
something exciting.
More seriously the Fighter Comand analogy illustrates some key points that
characterise the marketing database,
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Firstly it shows
that when things get complex we resort to models
- because it gives us a manageable way to see
the world |
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It also reminds
us that the model needs to represent accurately
what happens the real world |
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And that the model
must be dynamic and represent movement |
Finally, and most importantly, the database, like the model, is a strategic
tool. It helps people see the big picture, make decisions and take action
- action which is essential to create business value - and what's more
that action further refines the model.
That is what the marketing database is for: to guide strategy, to support
decision making, to enable action and to provide feedback on the results
of that action. It is not just a big address book, it is a key tool on
the route from data to value.
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