Seurat’s lesson for marketers

It seems that many marketers still struggle to build a rich picture of their customers.

They could do worse than study the works of Georges Seurat, the famous French impressionist painter of the 19th century, whose techniques have interesting lessons for today’s 21st century marketers.

But first, consider the following:

• Only 6% of marketers have excellent knowledge of their customers and 50% say they have only fair, limited or no knowledge of their customers.
• Over 31% of those surveyed said that no data mining was being conducted at all, and 63% were only doing moderate levels of data mining for customer intelligence and insight.
• Key initiatives to increase customer retention included improving customer communications (65.2%), addressing complaints, problems and pain points (51.8%), and enhancing the customer experience (54.8%).Sadly, fewer marketers cited their companies’ willingness to modify business practices and policies to accommodate customer needs.

These are the worrying findings from research conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer Council in the US.The report also points out that only 15% of CMOs surveyed say their companies effectively integrate customer data.

Despite the massive investments in CRM systems and customer focus programmes, few organisations have either the means or the will to put the customer at the heart of their business.

One to one marketing is only truly effective if a company can pull together the disparate threads of information scattered about the organisation.

Continues at E-Consultancy