Recently, the Bisnode Group, mother of the WDM Belgium Company, conducted a research amongst European marketeers, looking for trends and what they expect from data companies as we are.

Here is the outcome in 10 bullet points :

1. Stop permission, start collaborating, instead of push and sell.   

2. Brand identification = brand loyalty : the more a customer identifies himself with you and your values, the more loyal advocacy he will give you in return.  Branding will also in the future be very important.  It's not the end goal of a communication manager, but the start of a conversation.  If you want to identify your customers, this also means you have to capture more than only 'objective' data of them.

3. From walled garden to social platforms.  In you search to evolve from interesting consumers to infuencial consumers, you do not only ask them to come to you, but you have to make sure you go and meet them where they are.  To do so, you need to collect all the touchpoints where you can conversate with them.

4. Try to keep up with the ultra fast moving consumer.  It will be vital to adapt strategies and campaings on an ongoing and instant basis.  Data intelligence is crucial to install the right triggers to target the consumer 'in the moment'. 

5. Forget the internet : it’s connection forever time, instant, now and everywhere.  This give you also live access to all types of 'real time' data, supported and offered by dbase companies in full flexibility 

6.Offline is dead, long live offline : Online shall not exclude Offline, Life is not only virtual and traditional direct mailing is certainly complementary to your media- and 1:1 strategy

7.  Merge, integrate, shuffle and deal : collaborative marketeers will create joint marketing offers and run them in fully integrated mega databases.

8.Surgical targeting  : we need to go from direct marketing to precision marketing, with ultraniche as a challenge, shooting with a small gun form short distance instead of spamming your entire audience with one size fits all messages.

9.   1:1 makes the marketeer smart.  All interactions give marketeers live research and insights available.  Marketeers seek for services that integrate brand KPI’s, marcom metrics, socio-demo’s, behavioral data, research insights,… and enables them to measure return on investment and moreover, return on customer.

10.Future marketing is experimental marketing.  You need tot test test test continuously, even test in real time, learn from it and adapt fast.

So yes, we think there is much to say about data being the new oil and a nice challenge for data companies to help the marketeers.  Since consumers are ultra moving targets, marketeers need to capture more data, mine all data and find better ways to exploit them.  "Data" will become so complex, marketeers can’t handle it alone.  External expertise is needed and "strategicly handling data" will be a valuable asset for companies.  Therefor new technologies en techniques should be embraced to enable better ‘gathering’ and profitable ‘targeting’

But be aware : privacy laws -and the consumer itself!- are becoming more strict.  Consumers will be less eager to share data in the future, or at least request something in return.  Not only a give-away or the possibility to win something big.  Consumers become 'data brokers' and in return for 'their data' they want more relevancy.  Data companies should help marketeers to deliver more relevancy by better segmentations and accurate ‘surgical’ databases to assure consumers that information is exchanged in both interest.