Avon Calling--And Calling And Calling

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Avon Calling--And Calling And Calling

By John Foley
Issue date: Oct. 30, 1995

Natalie Goldberg is paid to deal with information overload. As the manager of strategic information for Avon Products in New York, it's her job to gather competitive intelligence in the company's primary markets: the beauty, jewelry, and apparel industries. Despite the low-tech nature of Avon's products, the business is awash in data.

"We have tremendous information needs," says Goldberg. "We're always looking at new business opportunities. We're always looking at our competition. And we're always lo oking at the external economic environment as well."

To keep up, Goldberg subscribes to no fewer than five online news services: Knight-Ridder's Dialogue, Nexis/Lexis, Dow Jones, Individual, and Profound. On top of that, she regularly reads business and trade publications, and she occasionally outsources research to consultants.

Despite the heavy workload, Goldberg is just one of 45 employees in Avon's marketing intelligence department. The data gathered by that busy group is shared across Avon, a $4.3 billion company with 30,000 employees worldwide.

While much of the material is still distributed on paper, increased electronic distribution, mainly via E-mail and Lotus Notes, is a company goal.

Before long, Goldberg predicts, professionals of all kinds will be expected to manage their own information needs, including market research. That's because she sees many jobs evolving into a new class of professional: the researcher, computer expert, and industry analyst rolled into one.

"It used t o be sort of like a librarian's job," Goldberg says of her role. "Now, it's more in the realm of information management."

New user-friendly front-end tools in services such as Profound and Dialogue will help. "They're getting more and more user-friendly," says Goldberg. That's the key to Avon representatives being able to use them.

See second sidebar "Fighting E-Mail Glut"
or return to main story "Managing Information: Infoglut"

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