This document discusses the next generation of technology-driven marketing. It describes how new marketing architectures powered by advanced analytics and business rules can automatically generate highly personalized marketing campaigns for individual customers. This level of customization allows companies to improve customer intimacy, loyalty, and revenues. The document outlines the key components of next-generation marketing systems, including real-time data integration, customer profiling, and dynamic campaign management across all channels. It emphasizes that both marketing and IT executives must work closely to design and implement these new systems in order to fully realize their benefits.

1. Perspective Klaus Hölbling
Olaf Acker
Florian Gröne
Not Your Typical
Marketing Campaign
The Next Wave
of Technology-
Driven Marketing

2. Contact Information
Vienna Chicago
Klaus Hölbling Mike Cooke
Partner Partner
+43-1-518-22-907 +1-312-578-4639
klaus.hoelbling@booz.com mike.cooke@booz.com
Frankfurt New York
Olaf Acker Jeff Tucker
Principal Partner
+49-69-97167-453 +1-212-551-6653
olaf.acker@booz.com jeffrey.tucker@booz.com
Berlin Beirut
Florian Gröne Ramez Shehadi
Senior Associate Partner
+49-30-88705-844 +961-1-336433
florian.groene@booz.com ramez.shehadi@booz.com
Booz & Company

3. EXECUTIVE In a world overrun with marketing messages, the next wave
of marketing technology will cut through the clutter, building
SUMMARY
automated marketing campaigns that address your customers’
wants and needs individually. The result: greater customer
intimacy, improved loyalty, and higher revenues. Moving
quickly will gain real competitive advantage for you, so start
planning for the future now. Here’s how.
You’re in the middle of a business generation marketing IT: the new
trip. You’ve left your cell phone wave of technology-driven marketing.
charger at home, your phone’s battery
is dead, and a big client is calling Here’s how it works. While your
you in two hours. So you make phone is charging, the sales agent
your way to your mobile operator’ enters your phone number into the
nearest retail outlet to buy a new sales terminal, activating the customer
charger, and maybe a battery too. relationship software maintained on a
You walk in, hoping to complete this global network. Its purpose is to help
tedious errand quickly. Much to your the clerk recognize your individual
surprise, you walk out 20 minutes needs and predispositions, and to
later with a complete travel kit, offer you products likely to interest
including a spare charger, a battery, you. While you wait, the program
and a three-month trial subscription brings up your record and identifies
to the mobile company’s basic e-mail you as a high-value client, who makes
and Internet service package. How a lot of phone calls and occasionally
did that happen? Chalk it up to next- runs over your monthly allotment.
Booz & Company 1

4. You also do a lot of text messaging, in the information he or she receives marketing technology architectures,
regularly check your account online, from the computer. It tells the sales with three primary goals in mind. The
receive your bills via e-mail, and have agent precisely what to offer you, first goal is the ability to instantly
an up-to-date, multimedia-ready based on the statistical likelihood collect data from a variety of
phone. that you (or people like you) will be channels—including retail outlets, the
interested in the product or service. Web, or and the call center—and then
The system analyzes this information Under the circumstances, how can to distribute relevant information
for a few seconds and then, based on you refuse? You’re surprised and back to those channels. The second
pre-calculated scores, the campaign delighted by the travel kit, which in is the capacity to compile and
engine determines that you’re likely turn makes you feel more loyal to the generate a coherent view of every
to be an early adopter: the sort of company. Like many “high-value” customer, taking into account his or
person who is willing to try new users of the online trial, you will her histories and preferences. And the
technologies. In addition, the loyalty probably end up keeping the e-mail third goal is the creation of business
generated by the free travel kit should service, at the non-discount price, for rules that will govern every customer
makes it less likely that you would many years to come. interaction, including which messages
switch to a competitor, increasing to send and which deals to offer.
your expected “high-roller” lifetime None of those decisions—or the That’s a tall order, and the only way
value to the company by a significant business results that followed—would to get there is to make sure CIOs
percentage. The system leads the have been possible without the help work closely with marketers to lay
agent, step by step, to make you a of the next generation of marketing out the overall marketing strategy,
series of offers. A natural talent for technology. These new forms of and then to translate it into the
salesmanship may play a part in the information technology require a processes and rules that will play out
agent’s success, but the real secret lies transformation of current direct at every point of contact.
These new forms of information technology
require a transformation of current direct
marketing technology architectures.
2 Booz & Company

5. IN MARKETING, Consider how much more value your
visit to the shop generated for the
rules-based software engines, and
tailored to a “segment of one”—that
KNOWLEDGE phone company than a traditional individual business traveler standing
IS POWER marketing campaign would have.
Before that visit, you might have
in the shop with a dead phone, for
instance, or any one of hundreds of
received dozens of generic mailings, other people with different attitudes
at great expense, from the phone and needs—making the right offer to
company. None of them illuminated the right consumer at the right time
your individual needs and interests. (see Exhibit 1).
And you probably threw them all
away with hardly a glance. Next-generation campaign systems
will give marketers the ability to
What are those traditional marketing integrate data into their calculations
campaigns missing? They lack the from all touch points—the Web, the
analytical rigor, driven by information phone, the physical retail outlet—
technology, that might allow the through which they interact with
company to establish a better their customers and learn about them.
dialogue with its customers. The next With that knowledge, marketers
generation of marketing campaigns can also design flexible, real-time
can go beyond today’s rough efforts “inbound” campaigns that listen
at customer segmentation, using actively and respond to customer
IT to gather much more refined behavior and preferences. Should a
perspectives on customers and their customer complain about a product in
behavior. Messages and offers can an e-mail or during a customer service
be generated through dynamic, call, for instance, the business rules
Exhibit 1
The Next-Gen Campaigning Equation
PAST DATA ABOUT THE CLIENT CURRENT DATA ABOUT THE CLIENT SUPERIOR RESPONSE TO CLIENT NEEDS
• Products bought • ontact reason (such as product
C • ositively surprise clients with tailored
P
+ =
• Usage patterns inquiry or complaint) offers and superior customer service
• Past complaints • ustomer touch point (e.g. location
C • nsure that offers make economic
E
• Client lifetime value and type of store sense, customer by customer
• Recent client interactions • eal-time transaction data
R
• ther information gathered during
O
client interaction
Source: Booz Company
Booz Company 3

6. programmed into the IT system might including an accurate portrait of the
determine that he or she should be bank’s profits from each customer, on
sent an offer for a product upgrade. a monthly basis. The bank now uses
In effect, this type of IT system that portrait to segment customers,
maintains an ongoing conversation based on both their present and
with customers, reacting to every potential future value to the bank. For
customer action and learning more any given customer, a bank teller can
and more through each contact. bring up a screen containing detailed
information about that person, his
A large UK-based bank set itself the or her overall value to the bank,
goal of achieving better customer and the types of offer they are likely
insight in rethinking its marketing IT. to consider seriously. Much of this
After the implementation of a new information is based on “propensity
design, the bank was able to gather analysis”—what this customer is
transactional data and customer likely to buy, based on how similar
information across its entire product customers have behaved. The results
line, from mortgages to credit cards so far have been strong, and the
to savings accounts. That information bank is now widely recognized as the
enabled the system to generate most effective cross-seller of financial
a single view of each customer, products in the U.K.
In effect, this type of IT system
maintains an ongoing conversation
with customers, reacting to every
customer action and learning more
and more through each contact.
4 Booz Company

7. DESIGNING Next-generation direct marketing
demands a front-to-back rethink of
of the customer data. Using the new
architecture, all of those channels
A NEXT- the overall IT architecture, with the now connect to a central integrated
GENERATION ultimate goal of better understanding
the customer. Exhibit 2 lays out the
engine. This engine, available
throughout the network, mediates
ARCHITECTURE essential differences between the old between channels and the customer
architecture and the new. In the past, data and back-end processing. The
each channel would feed customer central campaign engine also contains
information individually into the the business rules that govern every
back-end customer relationship interaction with every customer.
management (CRM) and enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems that Key to the success of the architecture
processed transactions and held much is the creation of a flexible model of
Exhibit 2
Past- vs. Next-Generation Direct Marketing IT Architectures
TYPICAL MARKETING-IT SYSTEM OF THE PAST NEXT-GENERATION MARKETING SYSTEM DESIGN
Marketeer Marketeer
Data Data
Front-End Warehouse Data Data Front-End Marketing
Warehouse
Warehouse Data
Channels/ Warehouse Back-End Channels/ Workbench Back-End
Warehouse
Touch Points Systems Touch Points Systems
Channel Silo A1
Middle- Data Data
Mail/Fax ware Warehouse Mail/Fax Inbound Warehouse
Channel Silo A2
Channel Abstraction Integration
Enterprise Enterprise
Voice Channel Silo B Data Resource Voice Outbound Resource
Data Abstraction/EAI
Mart Planning Planning
Customer
Customer
Customer Integrated Customer
Retail Dash- Retail
IT
IT
Channel Silo C board Relationship Campaigning Relationship
Management Architecture Management
Service Analytics Service
Web Channel Silo D Web Reporting
Platforms Platforms
Workflow
E-channels Channel Silo E ... E-Channels Resource ...
Management
Source: Booz Company
Booz Company 5

8. the metadata that controls customer marketers to design cross-channel through mass mailings, rather than
information. This gives marketers campaigns that can rapidly shift understanding customers’ behavior and
the ability to tap into any number of direction from one combination of buying patterns. Its call center agents
customer data warehouses, without channels to the next. had no access to truly useful customer
the time and effort required to inte- information other than raw monthly
grate all that information into a single The system is designed to support bills, and its marketers had no faith in
database. This model also allows all critical processes and workflows the concept of predictive analytics.
every channel to tap into the same required by each campaign, from
collection of customer information. campaign planning and the build- A re-architecture of the company’s
The single most critical innovation, ing of the rules engines to campaign direct marketing technology provided
however, lies in doing away with the execution and the orchestration of a new marketing portal to its customer
typical siloed, channel-specific archi- multiple campaigns—even monitoring service agents, which gives them up-
tecture on which most current direct and reporting dynamically on the sys- to-date information on customers and
marketing and campaigning technol- tem’s success. Business users benefit their phone usage habits. Agents now
ogy depends. No customer-centric further through increased usability: have instant access to predictions of
marketing effort can be truly success- Users can create “dashboards” to aid customer behavior, and more than 50
ful if the technology is still organized in interacting with customers, manag- rule models are dynamically updated
around interaction channels, rather ing campaign workflows, monitoring as new transactions are entered. Agents
than those all-important customers a campaign’s progress, and assessing are instantly given offers to make to
who naturally interact with the busi- its performance. each customer (“Would you like to
ness through multiple channels. try our MP3 download package?”), a
A large European mobile carrier, with message to convey (“By receiving your
The new architecture also provides more than 10 million customers, bill via e-mail, you can do something
unprecedented flexibility. Because the almost 4,000 call center agents, and 2 for the environment!”), and a ques-
system is increasingly integrated into million monthly visitors to its Web site, tion to ask (“Would you mind sharing
a suite of marketing tools, campaigns was struggling to build the capabil- your e-mail address?”). The results
can be designed and executed without ity to accurately target its marketing have been impressive: The offer-to-sale
needing to be tied to individual chan- campaigns in this way. Prior to its conversion rate is now greater than
nels . All the business rules required shift to next-generation campaigning, 75 percent, while both customers and
by each channel are captured and the company’s marketing efforts had agents report significantly higher satis-
integrated by the system, allowing been oriented around selling products faction with the new system.
6 Booz Company

9. THE PATH TO Success in next-generation campaign-
ing depends on how you design the
involves a refinement of three general
campaigning requirements: planning,
THE NEXT new system and incorporate it into analytics and execution. The first
GENERATION your company. Each step of the way
will require the willingness to rethink
stage, which many large companies
have already built, provides the
your overall marketing strategy, the essential ability to design specific
tactical processes by which you plan campaigns, analyze and segment
and carry out each campaign, and customers based on their behavior,
the IT tools you need. You must and create outbound campaigns.
develop the skills required to design Exhibit 3 lays out the order in which
and execute analytic campaigns and, these capabilities might be developed.
of course, you will need to build the
technologies to enable those cam- At the same time, it’s critical to
paigns. Most important, from begin- remember that next-generation
ning to end, the CIO and the CMO campaign systems demand significant
must work together as partners to changes to marketing practices and
design, build, and test the necessary processes, and they don’t come cheap.
infrastructure, and to expand it, step CIOs and CMOs must think carefully
by step, throughout your company. about their company’s real needs as
they plan and design the system, and
Sequence is critical. Think of the then evaluate the technology and
capabilities you’ve decided to build software products on offer to see how
as a set of building blocks that must closely they meet those needs. A lot of
be put together in a certain order. money can be saved by being realistic
These capabilities should be built in about your company’s requirements,
multiple stages, with each subsequent and not overbuying.
stage dependent on the success of
the preceding stage, and all sharing For example, is having the ability to
in the final victory. Each stage process new inbound information in
Exhibit 3
Campaign Capability Building Blocks
Customer Recurring
Campaign- segmentation outbound
specific plans behavior Stage 1
campaigns
analysis
Campaign Rule-based
Trigered
portfolio decision Stage 2
campaigns
plan making
Campaign Real-time,
Inbound
portfolio iterative Stage 3
campaigns
optimization decision making
Planning Analytics Execution
Source: Booz Company
Booz Company 7

10. real time, as soon as it is received, The more complex the requirements, ware as a service and service-oriented
really necessary? Or might it be suf- naturally, the more support and auto- architectures make integrating the
ficient to use pre-calculated, batch- mation you’ll want. various elements of a best-of-breed
processed responses that correspond architecture significantly easier.
to real-time customer input? Truly The decisions you make about trade-
dynamic real-time capabilities are offs between wants and needs will Whichever path you decide to follow,
relatively expensive to build, and also affect how you choose your the time to think systematically about
companies need to consider care- vendors. Should you buy a marketing your marketing technology is now.
fully whether the difference between suite or should you take a more open, Building the means to gather and
instantly updated customer profiles best-of-breed approach? Many of the analyze your customer data and then
and hourly or daily updates, for so-called suites came about as the put it to work in clearly defined cam-
instance, will make a significant dif- result of vendors buying or merging paigns is no easy task. But you can be
ference in their overall success. with other vendors. Too often, such sure that your competitors are already
suites still suffer from poor integra- at it, or at least thinking about the
Similar trade-offs should be taken tion of their various modules, and problem. To keep a step or two ahead
into account when considering the that can cause problems in areas such of them, start working toward the
degree to which you want the system as the creation of working metadata kind of marketing campaigns that
to support the marketing organiza- models that pull data from various would really drive growth, and the
tion’s workflow, and to what extent databases. That’s why some compa- IT systems and tools you’ll need to
you want those processes to be auto- nies may prefer to follow a best-of- drive those campaigns. Build a plan
mated. These decisions will be based, breed approach, buying modules as for achieving those goals quickly. And
in turn, on the size of the marketing needed, and integrating them into a rally your marketing and IT troops
organization, the complexity of your preexisting campaign-management to action now. The fast mover in the
campaigns, and the number of differ- system, for instance. This approach is race to next-generation marketing
ent channels you expect will need to also beginning to look more and more will gain a huge competitive advan-
be integrated into the overall system. attractive as technologies such as soft- tage. Don’t be left behind.
From beginning to end, the CIO and the
CMO must work together as partners
to design, build, and test the necessary
infrastructure, and to expand it, step by
step, throughout your company.
8 Booz Company

11. About the Authors
Klaus Hölbling is a partner Florian Gröne is a senior asso-
with Booz Company in ciate with Booz Company in
Vienna. He supports leading Berlin. He works with telecoms,
businesses in consumer- IT service providers, and other
oriented industries, such IT-enabled businesses to
as telecom, high tech, and enhance operating models and
transportation, in enhancing technology platforms, espe-
their marketing, sales, and cially in their marketing, sales,
customer-service capabilities. and customer-management
He can be reached at klaus. functions. He can be reached
hoelbling@booz.com or at florian.groene@booz.com or
+43-1-518-22-907. +49-30-88705-844.
Olaf Acker is a principal with
Booz Company in Frankfurt.
He works with communications,
media, and technology com-
panies, focusing on technology
strategy to enhance their prod-
uct development, marketing,
sales, and customer care-
related capabilities. He can be
reached at olaf.acker@booz.
com or +49-69-97167-453.
Booz Company 9

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