Target Marketing without Data Quality - aka Shotgun Marketing

The retail social space has been buzzing about target marketing, but are retailers getting the result that they want?  More importantly, are consumers satisfied with how retailers are reaching out to them?  The answer is "not exactly".  Why you ask me?  Elementary my dear Watson.  Data Quality is missing.

More often than not, when retailers think of target marketing, they think about how they can better understand their consumer in terms of their historical actions.  If you buy x, you will likely need or want to buy y.  If you do a, you will likely do b.  This is indeed helpful; however, are retailers getting the complete picture of the consumer?  I recently bought an iPad online and then bought an iPad HDMI output cable from a brick and mortar store at the same retailer.   Guess what, a week later, they sent me a email asking me to buy an iPad HDMI cable.  WTF.  How could they not know I already bought an HDMI cable?  I used the same credit card so it was an easy layup to correlate the two transactions to me.  Super lame.  How can you target market to me if you do not even know who I am or what I have done?  Not very targeted.  Hence, target marketing without data quality is also known as shotgun marketing.  Shotgun marketing is not going to generate many happy customers nor will retailers prosper from it.

I would highly advise retailers (especially multi-channel retailers) to not only look at my history to target market to me, but also invest in making sure they have the full picture of their customer.   To have a true target marketing platform, you need data quality as the foundation.