Direct Marketing and Machine Learning: A perfect match - Part I

In 1967, Lester Wunderman, the father of toll-free numbers, coined the term "Direct Marketing". A simple concept of selling products directly to consumers, thus eliminating the middleman from the process. It was only that the term was coined much later whereas, the concept was obvious to businesses even in the 1800s.

The appeal of the concept is simple - Direct Marketing of relevant products to customers is not just about time and money. It is also the feeling that the brand values the customer's need and that create a direct sentiment with the brand. Some marketeers like to call that sentiment 'Loyalty' which is considered as the key to customer's attention, anticipation, heart and ultimately pocket. Well, we don't have to bother about choosing new brands every day as long as our needs are sufficiently met, do we?

You would think that a proven concept which has been practised for 2 centuries would have been perfected by now. Well, it's far from reality. With plethora of information, companies are still fighting for the relevance. Customer Loyalty isn't even a trivial problem. As the choices increase, it has become difficult for customers to differentiate between brands. 

This gave birth to concepts like Targeted Marketing and Hyper Personalisation. Marketeers use these for one-to-one communcations with their customer and make them feel special. However, most CRM systems and Marketing Automation tools available today are deterministic in nature which means they can only do so much. It is evident that the complexity of this problem can only be solved through a probabilistic software capable of learning new behaviours and proactively adapt to change in needs. 

This is where Machine Learning comes into the picture. It feeds on various criterion of customer's past information and predicts their future behaviour. As we will see next time, Machine Learning is not just a need but is the only solution which can address the problem of such stature.