Precision Marketing: The New Rules for Attracting, Retaining and Leveraging Profitable Customers - Hardcover

by Jeff Zabin (Author), Gresh Brebach (Author), Philip Kotler (Foreword by)

Today, the pressure to demonstrate Marketing ROI has never been greater, and many companies are taking a more scientific approach to marketing, and treating it as a true business discipline. This means applying more rigor to capturing, analyzing and manipulating customer data, and delivering narrowly-defined messages designed to resonate with customers' specific wants and needs. This process is called precision marketing. Based on extensive research and their own experience working with some of the world's largest and most progressive marketing organizations, Jeff Zabin and co-author Gresh Brebach show how precision marketing can yield enormous business value. Writing in an engaging style that touches on everything from Renaissance thinking to Minority Report, they provide a definitive roadmap for combining precision marketing with mass marketing to cut costs, grow revenues, and create an overall competitive advantage.

Front Jacket

COMPANIES: "How can we spend our marketing dollars more effectively, and minimize waste?"

CUSTOMERS: "Why can't companies cut out all the junk, and present me with only relevant and compelling offers?"

Marketers spend upwards of $250 billion a year on advertising and other forms of marketing promotion. Is it money well spent? In most cases, the answer is no, not by a long shot. The reason is simple: Most marketing messages reach a large number of the "wrong people" and only a small fraction of the "right people." The wrong people are consumers from whom a company stands to derive little, if any, benefit. The right people are consumers who can make all the difference in the world in terms of future growth and profitability.

In their efforts to drive brand awareness and sales revenues, smart companies are coming to realize they can no longer afford to market mostly to the wrong people. They can no longer put all their eggs in the basket of mass media marketing-or, what some executives knowingly call "spray-and-pray marketing."

Today, the pressure to demonstrate marketing ROI has never been greater. That being the case, many companies are taking a hard look at how they allocate their marketing resources. They're taking a more scientific approach to marketing and treating it as a true business discipline. This means more rigorously capturing, analyzing, and manipulating customer data. And it means delivering narrowly defined messages that are differentiated, and designed to resonate with customers' specific wants and needs. This process is called precision marketing. The good news is that it can be readily deployed, thanks to a new breed of high-tech tools and analytical capabilities.

With this book, Jeff Zabin and coauthor Gresh Brebach show how these tools and capabilities can yield enormous business value. Writing in an engaging style that touches on everything from Renaissance thinking to science fiction à la Minority Report, they provide a definitive road map for combining precision marketing with mass marketing to cut costs, grow revenues, and create an overall competitive advantage.

Based on extensive research and their own experience working with some of the world's largest and most progressive marketing organizations, Zabin and Brebach take an exhaustive look at how smart companies are-in the words of P&G's CEO A. G. Lafley-"tying marketing spending more tightly to sales potential and using new approaches to target consumers more efficiently." Topics include:

• The key social and technological trends remaking the marketing landscape, and what it all means for corporate decision makers
• How managers can respond productively to the pressures of resource constraints and marketing accountability
• The importance of context sensitivity, the ongoing evolution of market segmentation, and the benefits of "blueprinting the ideal customer"
• How new technology-enabled processes can be used to manage customer data and drive more efficient and profitable customer interactions
• How business process outsourcing can improve the overall productivity and effectiveness of marketing programs
• How to strike the right balance between capturing customer data and respecting customer privacy
• How modeling and scoring techniques can be used to predict future customer preferences, match offerings to customer wants and needs, and create the marketing messages that are most likely to elicit a favorable response

With a foreword by marketing guru Philip Kotler, Precision Marketing paints a vivid portrait of a technology-enabled future rife with happy marketers and happy customers. It's a portrait that smart companies can take to the bank starting today.

Back Jacket

Praise for Precision Marketing

"At Timex, we know about precision. For 150 years, we've built quality watches that tell accurate and exact time. Like other innovative companies, we also know about the need to deliver targeted and compelling marketing messages by taking advantage of new technologies and data analytics. In this book, Zabin and Brebach provide excellent guidance for doing just that!"
-Mark Shuster, Chief Marketing Officer, Timex Corporation

"During my twenty-year career as an advertising executive, I was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars spent on building powerful brand relationships. Yet, at the end of the day, I was never able to give our clients something they really wanted: deep, intimate knowledge about their customers. This book shows how, by utilizing precision marketing techniques, companies can uncover that intimate knowledge-and, ultimately, create increased shareholder value. The insights are illuminating, compelling, and highly actionable."
-Steven Sjoblad, former president, Fallon Worldwide

"Today's business environment demands that companies understand consumers by narrowly defined segments, and manage and value them accordingly. Jeff Zabin and Gresh Brebach do an excellent job of showing how precision marketing is the catalyst that allows a company to deliver increased value to consumers while also achieving greater financial returns for shareholders. This book is a must-read for any marketer trying to achieve either of these goals."
-Michael J. Bragg, Founder
Online Strategies and Consumer Centric Marketing Services
ConAgra Foods

"With The Seven Steps to Nirvana, Jeff Zabin established his reputation as a thought leader in the area of technology-enabled business strategy. With the publication of this book, he extends that reputation deep into the realm of marketing.
-Jim Anfield, President, Strategic Management Association

"Everybody knows mass marketing is dead, but until now nobody has taken the next step: figuring out how to target a company's most profitable customers. Jeff Zabin and Gresh Brebach have tackled this job with Precision Marketing, an interesting, well-written, and well-researched book on the subject. Every marketer should read it."
-Al Ries, coauthor, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR

Author Biography

JEFF ZABIN is Director of Marketing in the Global Marketing Solutions group at Fair Isaac, the leading provider of customer analytics and decision technology. He is the coauthor of The Seven Steps to Nirvana.

GRESH BREBACH is President of the Brebach Group, specializing in marketing services. Previously, he served as a Director at McKinsey & Co. and a Managing Partner of Accenture.