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Find this article at: http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/marketing/2000/10/16/20794

New Tools For New Rules

From the October 24, 2000 issue

Alex Perez
Bryan Farmer

Unica, an 8-year-old Lincoln, Mass.–based customer-relationship management (CRM) and marketing-automation company, is hoping that its recently released suite of applications, called Affinium, will be the one-stop-shop for marketing and ad campaign management.

The suite consists of three previously released products—Affinium Model, Affinium Campaign, and Affinium Interact—and one new module, Affinium Report. Marketing professionals must shell out no less than $215,000 to get the lot; fees increase with the number of users and size of database.

Here's what you get for that hefty pricetag: Model is the predictive wing of the suite. It uses data mining to "figure out" customers' needs. Campaign manages all aspects of an ad campaign; using Model-based predictions, the application monitors and manages all ad channels—from email and catalogs to call centers. Interact creates a permission-based communication with each customer, and manages unsubscribes. And Report provides real-time campaign information and customer profiling data.

Should you fire your marketing staff and replace it with Unica's software suite? Scott Nelson, vice president and research director with the GartnerGroup, isn't sure that's a great idea. "Affinium is a good attempt to try to work in the real-world environment that clients face," he says. "I say ‘attempt,' since to date the company doesn't have the references to bear out its claims."

But Nelson does see benefits in Unica's solution over CRM competitors such as Clarify and Siebel: "Unica is attacking marketing problems, not customer-contact problems." He also thinks packaging the applications is smart, as many companies have had to resort to multiple vendors to get management, analytics, and infrastructure tools.
—Bryan Farmer

Digital Idea President Peter Mackey believes that the path to customer loyalty is all attitude, not click-throughs. "The true predictors of loyalty are the positive feelings one has that causes them to exhibit loyal behavior, rather than the behavior itself," Mackey asserts.

So his Westport, Conn.–based company, a subsidiary of market research firm the Greenfield Group, developed Dialscore, a subscription-based loyalty measuring tool. For a $50,000 annual fee, customers get quarterly loyalty rating reports from one ecommerce category. The 17 categories available include PCs, health care, books, music, video, travel, auctions, clothing, careers, search engines, and portals. Clients can monitor an additional category for $10,000. Dialscore polls members of Greenfield's survey panel of some 1.7 million users to determine how many customers feel positively toward a site on six key measures, such as the degree to which a customer's expectations were exceeded and the ease of building an ongoing relationship with a particular site.

Analyst Melissa Shore of Jupiter Communications says Digital Idea showed good timing with Dialscore. "We're at the point [in the development of ecommerce] where there's a shift in emphasis from customer acquisition to customer retention," Shore says. But Bob Chatham of Forrester Research says that tracking loyalty is more complicated than Dialscore's makers would have users believe. "This is only one slice of a customer relationship," Chatham says. "It's the right idea, but not quite broad enough."
—Alex Perez

Alex Perez ([email-masked])
Bryan Farmer ([email-masked])

Content copyright © 2000 Imagine Media Inc.