COMPANIES: How can we spend our marketing dollars more effectively, and minimize waste? CUSTOMERS: Why can't companies cut out all the junk, and present me with only relevant and compelling offers? Marketers spend upwards of $250 billion a year on advertising and other forms of marketing promotion. Is it money well spent? In most cases, the answer is no, not by a long shot. The reason is simple: Most marketing messages reach a large number of the wrong people and only a small fraction of the right people. The wrong people are consumers from whom a company stands to derive little, if any, benefit. The right people are consumers who can make all the difference in the world in terms of future growth and profitability. In their efforts to drive brand awareness and sales revenues, smart companies are coming to realize they can no longer afford to market mostly to the wrong people. They can no longer put all their eggs in the basket of mass media marketing-or, what some executives knowingly call spray-and-pray marketing. Today, the pressure to demonstrate marketing ROI has never been greater. That being the case, many companies are taking a hard look at how they allocate their marketing resources. They're taking a more scientific approach to marketing and treating it as a true business discipline. This means more rigorously capturing, analyzing, and manipulating customer data. And it means delivering narrowly defined messages that are differentiated, and designed to resonate with customers' specific wants and needs. This process is called precision marketing. The good news is that it can be readily deployed, thanks to a new breed of high-tech tools and analytical capabilities. With this book, Jeff Zabin and coauthor Gresh Brebach show how these tools and capabilities can yield enormous business value. Writing in an engaging style that touches on everything from Renaissance thinking to science fiction à la Minority Report, they provide a definitive road map for combining precision marketing with mass marketing to cut costs, grow revenues, and create an overall competitive advantage. Based on extensive research and their own experience working with some of the world's largest and most progressive marketing organizations, Zabin and Brebach take an exhaustive look at how smart companies are-in the words of P&G's CEO A. G. Lafley-tying marketing spending more tightly to sales potential and using new approaches to target consumers more efficiently. Topics include: The key social and technological trends remaking the marketing landscape, and what it all means for corporate decision makers How managers can respond productively to the pressures of resource constraints and marketing accountability The importance of context sensitivity, the ongoing evolution of market segmentation, and the benefits of blueprinting the ideal customer How new technology-enabled processes can be used to manage customer data and drive more efficient and profitable customer interactions How business process outsourcing can improve the overall productivity and effectiveness of marketing programs How to strike the right balance between capturing customer data and respecting customer privacy How modeling and scoring techniques can be used to predict future customer preferences, match offerings to customer wants and needs, and create the marketing messages that are most likely to elicit a favorable response With a foreword by marketing guru Philip Kotler, Precision Marketing paints a vivid portrait of a technology-enabled future rife with happy marketers and happy customers. It's a portrait that smart companies can take to the bank starting today.
