Justify The Budget

A year after starting an enterprise-wide initiative to let the data drive its marketing decisions, Kodak is starting to see the effects. The company's approach used to be top down: set up annual budgets for broadcast, print, direct mail, online, email, and other marketing programs based on last year's spending. It now tries to constantly forecast the lift expected from each marketing spending, with measurement guidelines for each channel. "We're still going to give you a budget, but you have to show us directly how you're going to influence revenue," says Dale Brosch, Kodak's manager of CRM for the Americas.

Measurement is a given with direct mail, online, and email campaigns, and Kodak does extensive A/B comparisons that isolate the effect of ad creatives, promotional offers, customer segmentations, and messaging across all channels. It measures print ads and retail circular promotions, too, albeit more slowly by matching product registrations, which ask when and where customers purchased, against records of campaigns. About three in 10 customers register their products, so Kodak extrapolates as scientifically as it can.

As for the newest channels, Kodak employs a chief listener and a chief blogger, both of whom monitor and respond to relevant social network comments and customer reviews. Their outbound efforts must dovetail with the messaging and communications strategies developed for all other channels. And their success in influencing social channels is measured--with help from social network review platform BazaarVoice--and reported up to the chief marketing officer.

For customer segments that use smartphones heavily, Kodak tracks what kinds of devices people use to access an email or website, and it customizes campaigns for the most popular platforms, since the experience can vary device to device. "If you don't design for mobile, you don't know what customers are seeing on the device," Brosch says.