Unfortunately for Alton he wrote this right when the need to turn the traditional paradigm on its head is becoming more and more evident

it is easy to forget about the foundation of effective marketing – have an integrated view of your customers and prospects

Source: The Marketing Consortium : Developing an Integrated View of the Customer

We have been challenging traditional marketing here for while, and very supportive of Forrester’s piece that stated Marketing is in a state of crisis.  We have also looked at CRM and it is in state of crisis, and not delivering on the promise – more here, and several posts on CRM here.

CRM is predicated on collection of customer (and prospect) data, and presenting it to the agent/ CSR with suggested next products, and magically new sales will happen.

Well I have been whining about this for a while, and highly supportive of new marketing concepts but, a nagging question, has been, what is the answer?  How do we solve this conundrum.

Last night I read Doc’s post on VRM, and this might well be the genesis of an answer.  This diagram is something they created at the IIW conference.

What I like about this picture is that it dramatically makes the point that the “foundation of effective marketing: have an integrated view” is relatively useless.  Zero in on ‘Vendor 2″ in the diagram.  Lets assume they have that “integrated view”.  Sit in their seat and look out … they have no idea what vendor 1, or vendor 3 knows, is thinking or is planning.  And more importantly they have no idea what is happening with “me” in the centre, because in this diagram the only person who knows everything is “me”.

This top of this diagram fairly accurately describes what happens even today.  “Me” gathers information from various sources, (data sources – online banking, statements, etc) and vendors (telephone marketers, junk mail, internet research) and assesses the results.  Its not as clean as that, and certainly but basically that is what happens.

VRM adds “comparison based on match quality” which could be a tool/ site/ form of broker, that assesses the offers independently and provides a selection.  This is the magic of an intelligent agent that we conjectured about in the 90’s …. an independent bot (your definition!) that is all knowing about you, but only provides enough information to vendors to get detailed quotes, that can be assessed, and a choice made.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

Back to the integrated view – the most important point is providing a capability to listen, understand, accept and make prospects an offer that they are likely to accept, within suitable timeframe, probably immediate.  Of course that hasn’t been built yet, but this is the challenge, combined with product intelligence to provide accurate offers.