40 Things Database Marketers Should Never Do, Say Or Even Think About (Part 2)
Monday, June 11th, 2012Recently, DSA was asked to come up with 10 great database marketing ideas. We couldn’t think of ten great ideas, database related or otherwise, but it was easy to think of 40 or so things that database marketers shouldn’t do. Here the second installment of our Top 40 list of things not to do. (Not in order of importance.)
11) Never in the presence of a real statistician say multi-collinearity – just say collinearity.
Don’t ask why… no, we don’t know why either.
12) Never assume that a marketing person will remain in charge of a database project.
Eventually, in most cases, top management will hold IT responsible for data processing activities, and they’ll need to be in control. This is changing, but slowly.
13) Never assume that all of your marketing questions will be answered once you have built a marketing database.
Some questions can be answered directly (how many people bought product x in the last six months and live in New York) but most questions will require analysis that goes beyond simple queries. (Like, how often should you promote your best customers?)
14) Never assume that you are the only one in the room that doesn’t understand the difference between a data warehouse and a marketing database; between data analysis and data mining; between relationship marketing, database marketing one-to-one marketing ….
The amount of database jargon is increasing exponentially (that‘s jargon too) and few people mean the same thing when they say the same thing.
15) Never assume that a user friendly easy access tool is either user friendly or easy.
You probably already knew that.
16) Never believe that increasing processing power will automatically improve database performance.
The big problem is not processing or calculating; the types of calculations database marketers make are trivial; the problem is getting data from storage (disks) into memory where the processing takes place; thus more or faster processors are not the
answer to queries that take hours to run.
17) Never believe that new releases of database software or operating systems have been completely debugged.
Just don’t believe it, it’s not true.
18) Never assume any one person knows all there is to know about technology.
It‘s impossible to know everything there is to know about servers, client-server interfaces, pc‘s and mobile devices, to say nothing about the operating systems and applications software each requires. So, be careful that the answers to your questions aren’t just the answers that come to the mind of the person you’ve asked.
19) Never capture, store or maintain more data than you plan to use on the assumption that you will flgure out how to use it later.
You won’t, and the more data you have to manage the more complicated the management problem.
20) Never get excited about the fact that the cost of data storage is constantly going down
It is and will continue to go down, but that’s not the problem. Managing data and decision making is the problem.
Check back for the next 10 items on our list of the Top 40 things not to do.