The Plan B approach to Database Management Marketing

Ever hung out with typical agency "data guys?" It's creepy. Sit in on a discussion of customer modeling algorithms, and you'll throw away every grocery club card in your wallet. Using their leviathan über customer database, marketing data gurus can predict with reasonable certainty whether you watch Lost based on your ZIP+4. And if not you, they've got your next-door neighbor pegged.

One meeting with the data guys can make you want to opt out of everything any company ever offers you. Ever.

Fortunately, most consumers never sit face-to-face with a vampire scary data guy. They just want to save 75¢ on niblets. And so they leave a rich vein of data points which, when overlaid with attitudinal and ethnographic data allows us to clone them using a predictive quadratic that…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

That's how the data guys get you. They suck you in to a technical discussion of database management marketing, and suddenly you're too sleepy to question their mojo. You just smile and nod. And then you nod off.

Once spellbound, countless clients have been convinced to throw their money at the magical promise of database management marketing, only to discover that, like most mystical gurus, the data guys who said they had all the answers, didn't.

But it doesn't have to happen to you, if you follow Plan B's patented 2-step program for customer database marketing success. Step 1 is to avoid the scary marketing guys.

Step 2 is to call Plan B.

We won't tell you that customer database marketing is the answer to all your marketing needs. But it may be a part of the answer. That all depends on your challenges, your goals, and your priorities.

And that's where we start. Unlike scary data guru guys, Plan B takes a pragmatic approach to database management marketing. Yes, it can be a highly effective tool to refine your audience, hone your message, and target your communications. But the key word in that sentence is "tool." Customer database marketing is most useful when used to improve upon strategically sound and innovative creative-not as a substitute for it.

In other words: right message + right media + right timing + wrong creative = fail.

Plan B has a better equation. One that incorporates smart, targeted database management marketing into our integrated solutions, backing it with world-class creative and innovative interactive technology. And we do it without magic spells or incantations. Just proven, traditional marketing principles, balanced with the best of today's emerging technology.

You are getting sleepy…