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http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/trends/article.php/805821
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By Alexis Gutzman
July 20, 2001
I've been writing about e-commerce and e-business solutions for almost two years. A month or so ago it occurred to me that I was writing about solutions without being entirely clear as to what exactly the problems are that my readers need to have solved. Writers tend to talk to solutions providers and hear from solutions providers more than we talk to and hear from the potential clients of those solutions providers.
Two years ago, it was easy to identify the problems: processing payments, getting page-download times under seven seconds, preventing fraud, and having an easy checkout process. Today the problems as well as the solutions have become more complex and sophisticated: personalization, assorted ad formats, and rich media e-mail, to name a few. So, I decided to conduct a survey of marketing executives to see what they thought were the most pressing problems, and to determine definitively what is the biggest problem in online marketing today.
And the Winner Is ...
The results were disappointingly inconclusive. Marketing executives said "the problem" was one thing, but results from other questions unearthed what appears to be a bigger issue: Surprisingly, 85 percent of them revealed that they did not have business intelligence software in place that would give them meaningful access to the volumes of data they routinely collect about their own customers. More surprisingly, not one of the executives who expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of business intelligence he was getting identified it as a problem. Conversely, those who did have access to good data frequently indicated that lack of testing and refining based on metrics was a major problem in online marketing - not their problem, but others' problem.
Marketing executives identified the biggest problem to be the difficulty in having their messages heard over the clutter of other competing messages. It's the classical marketing problem: How to get and hold the attention of the customer. They also mentioned the problems of their messages being perceived as spam by their customers and demonstrating the effectiveness (return on investment (ROI)) of online marketing. The figure below shows the actual results of the survey.
Yet, in my opinion, there's still another candidate for the biggest problem: So many marketing executives are willing to operate in a business intelligence vacuum and do not perceive it as a problem. Is marketing truly more art than science?
Where's the ROI?
The second most frequently provided response (actually tied for second with the problem of messages being perceived as spam) was the problem of proving the effectiveness -- measuring the ROI -- of online marketing. While marketing executives identified the need to measure ROI, they did not seem to identify as a problem the lack of meaningful data that would improve a campaign and improve the ROI as the campaign progresses. This is analogous to purchasing a scale to measure whether weight is lost, rather than buying a treadmill to make sure that it is.
Privacy vs. Personalization Debate Overhyped
One interesting result of the survey is that, despite all the press that the privacy industry gets with their concerns about the threats to personal privacy represented by online merchants, the threats remain basically a theoretical possibility rather than a reality. Only 15 percent of the respondents are satisfied with the quality of their business intelligence. Fewer are acting on this data. Threats to privacy by invidious businesses are still in the distant future. There is still plenty of time for business to work out an industry-led privacy-protection system without the government getting involved (see my column Technology Is The Answer)
Get the Report
The report that was produced as a result of the survey is too long to fit in this space. You can download it at
www.overtheweb.com/research. It includes questions that need answering and recommendations for both marketers and business intelligence solutions providers.
If You Want To Be Included in Future Surveys ...
These surveys will be conducted quarterly. Next time there will be one survey of marketing middle managers and one of executives to see how issues differ and whether there's a disconnect between those at the top and those on the front lines. If you'd like to be included in future surveys, please send me a message at marketing-research@overtheweb.com. Indicate in the subject line whether the executive survey or the middle manager survey is more appropriate for you. Please include basic contact information, including your title, in your message.
Note to readers: You can hear me today (7/23) on The Midday Show on CNET Radio (910 AM in the San Francisco/San Jose area) or online at this link.
Alexis D. Gutzman is an author, speaker, and consultant on e-business and e-commerce topics. Her most recent book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena, was named one of the 30 best business books of this year. For more information on her upcoming speaking engagements, please contact her directly at agutzman@internet.com.
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