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INDUSTRY NEWS
The Name Game
The industry is divided as to whether companies that are releasing their lists are damaging their hard-won customer loyalty or actually benefiting the DM industry as a whole, writes Peter Crush.
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For small clubs like the Society for All Artists, list rental is a real boon to their income. Its recently released list of 22,000 mail order buyers will not only bring in revenue, but the club is confident that third party mailings will be welcomed by its members.
But when this activity is scaled up to renting hundreds of thousands of names from a variety of lists, the anti-DM brigade talk of the raping and pillaging of customer data. Opinion has always been divided in the industry about the value of selling data to third parties, and this has been stirred up recently by two new developments.
In November last year WHSmith announced that for the first time data on customers, complete with purchasing behaviour, would be available to rent through Swetenhams. With 1.2 million names, that's not exactly small fry. At the same time, the Jigsaw Consortium - the private data sharing agreement between Cadbury Trebor Bassett, Kimberly-Clark and Unilever - also announced that consumer buying and behaviour habits data would become available to certain partners.
Although all these are opt-in names, the industry is unsure just how to react to this. It used to be the case that hell would freeze over before many marketers would sell their own, preciously collected, data. So are we beginning to see genuine change in attitude, or are marketers cashing in on their massive database of names? And is this good for the DM industry as a whole?
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One dimensional data
But if new lists are only aimed at non-competitors, is the ability to drill down to any level of real use if it still produces only vague detail on what someone has bought and how often?
According to Timothy Alan, CEO of data engineering consultancy Rocket Science, the problem with what he calls "spin-off lists" is that the data is often one dimensional. "What a Tesco shopper buys is interesting if you are Sainsbury's, but for any other non-competing company I would view the worth of this data with scepticism. There really isn't the expertise to turn it into something of real value. Even Claritas can get it wrong, so what hope is there for other lesser companies?"
Anne Gowan, direct marketing director at the Telegraph, says she has restricted her list selling because she felt it was impacting on the brand.
"A few years ago the commercial list was freely available to virtually anyone that wanted it," she says. "Our readers are extremely precious. Research tells us valuable information about them and their interests, but not even this is sold. I'm probably missing a trick, but it is more for the brand's sake that I have decided to keep it to ourselves."
Whether this is the new way ahead or not remains to be seen. What the industry can be sure of is that if there's a list that ought to be out there, it probably already is. The craving for data seems to be continuing unabated.
Marketing Direct 24-01-2003 07:00
Source: http://www.brandrepublic.com/dmbulletin/news_story.cfm?id=168690
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