Briefs

Brandweek.com, April 13, 2008, Kenneth Hein

Marketers, who spend millions to gain data about their customers, generally fail to use it properly, per a new CMO Council study.

Only 16% of companies rate themselves as effective or extremely good when it comes to customer relationship management. Forty-five percent said they are deficient or need more work at integrating and leveraging customer data gleaned from customer relationship management software.

The report polled 450-plus marketers globally. The New York-based CMO Council teamed with Computer Sciences Corp., IBM Software and Dun & Bradstreet to conduct the research.

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For many, however, "the landscape is a mess in terms of how data sources are linked," said Babcock. As a result, 31% of respondents said they don't do any data mining at all. In the end, the number of respondents claiming to have an excellent knowledge of their customers when it comes to demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data: only 6%.

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