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

By Jeff Zabin and Gresh Brebach
Published by Wiley

"The possibilities for improving the outcomes of practically any given marketing program are virtually endless."

You can attract the mistress of measurable marketing efforts without quitting mass marketing, say Jeff Zabin and Gresh Brebach, authors of Precision Marketing: The New Rules for Attracting, Retaining, and Leveraging Profitable Customers.

Philip Kotler says as much in his foreword: "... they transcend the argument of one-to-one vs. mass marketing, as well as creative/intuitive marketing vs. scientific database marketing, by realizing that the truth isn't in the black or the white. Rather, the truth is always in the gray, and these seemingly opposing marketing forces can be reconciled to a company's competitive advantage."

It doesn't need to be belabored, especially not in a book touted in press materials and other book reviews as delivering the solutions to better marketing effectiveness and accountability, smarter marketing allocations, and a more scientific approach to the function overall so that it may take its place as a business discipline once more.

Zabin and Brebach couch their suggestions — for discrete choice analysis, optimization, continuous ROI measurements, and more built into a customized marketing dashboard —in a lot of the same old marketing chatter. Even tired, nearly retired, marketers know that mass marketing reaches more irrelevant eyes and ears than interested targets, and that data should not exist in SBU silos but in a central databank.

Yet there are many good suggestions made in this book. Among them:

Assemble technical platforms and data analysis capabilities to specialize and simplify your approach to marketing design and execution;
define marketing objectives in quantifiable terms;
segment customers not by RFM but by the contexts in which they buy/the reasons for their purchases;
employ discrete choice surveys;
apply optimization algorithms to determine the best matches among segments, product offers, and marketing channels; and
overlay the patterns from predictive modeling on a rules engine, establishing automatic triggers to reactivate attriting customers or to generate incremental activity from others.

Most, unfortunately, lie buried beneath the weight of "duh" marketing clichés and industry assessments.

Perhaps the authors may be trying to include reluctant marketing incumbents who want to show the CEO progress a little at a time in order to keep executive expectations modest and risk low. Zabin and Brebach don't need to fear coming out as vocal advocates for accountability, however. Marketplace activities and the new marketing chatter certainly show that we're ready for a new message.

But fear not. If you find yourself reading things you knew before, wade through them to get to the gems of this book. You will find it worthwhile.

Check out our interview with Jeff Zabin, co-author of Precision Marketing.