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REVIEW
You can’t excel in a recession
You have customers. You have data. uring the consumer boom, Tesco dominated media
You want to make better decisions.
D
coverage of shoppers’ behaviour. As the recession hit, the
names in the headines changed. Now it is Sainsbury’s and
Lidl who get written about favourably.
But you don’t have much budget. Consumers are either trading down significantly or looking for a
trade-off between quality and price. Those two chains seem to have
David Reed considers the options. positioned themselves exactly right for this new mood.
A similar trend can be seen in the world of data management. In
the boom, high-end analytical data warehouses were an ambition
for every growth business. With capital expenditure slashed and
budgets hard to justify, things have changed. Now, the idea of
managing data in an Excel spreadsheet is starting to look attractive
to even a global blue-chip.
So what can software vendors and marketing services providers do
to deliver recession-friendly solutions? Does low cost always mean
low on features, or is it possible to get a single customer view without
reaching deep into threadbare pockets?
According to Jon Epstein, director of R-Cubed, “actually no-one
ever had consultancy and marketing database budgets. The trouble is
that the term SCV has become generic for expensive, when it used to
mean a marketing database.”
He says the differences between the two concepts are real and
important and have a big implication for cost. But equally a spreadsheet
can be a database, provided it is being used for straightforward tasks
like routine communications and list management.
“The average user of a spreadsheet doesn’t know how to do
something like a weighted percentage. Excel is good enough for
running a database – we find a lot of clients holding disparate data on
Excel or Access,” says Epstein.
Needing to integrate these multiple sources is one of the reasons
why companies start to think about building a single customer view
and therefore look for external support. This is the point at which
Epstein warns, “beware geeks bearing gifts”. It is easy to get upsold
on a highly-congfigured SCV that is over-engineered. “Ninety per
cent of companies want a customer database, not a SCV,” he says.
Keeping the specification tight is an important discipline in a
down economy. If customer data is being captured into Excel, can
that same data feed be directed into a new database or will it still
need to be collated on the spreadsheet first? These type of
concerns are what affect the cost of a solution because they may
incur manual data workarounds.
To steer a course through current trading conditions, companies
are looking to their data for evidence and support. Any deficiencies
risk undermining the business strategy, especially one based on
customer retention, which is why there is a strong move towards
investing in data management this year.
For some, the first steps in this journey are from Excel to
specially-written database solutions. “We’ve long believed that what
we have to offer is a set of tools that enable a business to be more
effective and efficient. That has never been more relevant,” says
Tony Speakman, managing director of Filemaker.
His company provides a solution that is typically adopted by
SMEs who want to have a properly structured database. “There are
people who are going to try to do it on the cheap. The danger is that
they go too far down that road,” he warns. Adopting a database or
service which locks the data into a proprietary data model, for
example, would be a false economy once conditions improve.
16 DATA STRATEGY | REPORT | APRIL 2009
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