Marketing Insights From a to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know

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Marketing Insights from A to Z

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mation on individual customers or dealers. The first company in each
of these respective industries to exploit database marketing could
achieve a substantial competitive lead.
There is a growing threat to effective database marketing that is
coming from the inherent conflict between customer and company
interests (see box).
Database Marketing
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What Customers Want
• We want companies not to have extensive personal infor-
mation about us.
• We would be willing to tell some companies what we
might like to be informed about.
• We would want companies to reach us only with relevant
messages and media at proper times.
• We would want to be able to reach companies easily by
phone or e-mail and get a quick response.
What Companies Want
• We want to know many things about each customer and
prospect.
• We would like to tempt them with offers, including those
that they might not have awareness of or initial interest in.
• We would like to reach them in the most cost-effective
way regardless of their media preferences.
• We want to reduce the cost of talking with them live on
the phone.

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The irony is that as companies learn more about each customer
in order to make more relevant offers, customers see this as an inva-
sion of privacy. The matter is made worse by intrusive junk mail, junk
phone calls, and junk e-mail. As privacy concerns rise and lead to leg-
islation curtailing what companies may know about individual cus-
tomers and how the companies can reach customers, companies will
be forced to return to less efficient mass marketing and transaction-
oriented marketing.
One answer is for companies to practice 
permission marketing
,
as promoted by Seth Godin.
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You should ask your customers what
information they will volunteer, what messages they would accept,
and what contact media they would prefer.
esign
Design is a big idea, covering product design, service design,
graphic design, and environmental design. Design provides a set
of tools and concepts for preparing successful products and ser-
vices. Yet too few managers know what design is or value it. At
best, they equate design with style. Style is important, of course:
We must accept that the Jaguar automobiles’ success in the past
was based on style. It certainly wasn’t based on dependability,