The manager and the irrational defense of the database

The recent news in Spain that far from boasting almost 870,000 members, the Popular Party (which governed from 2012 to last month) in fact had just around 67,000 raises a number of interesting questions in relation to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last May 25th.

The GDPR presents businesses and organizations with the dilemma of what to do with databases stuffed with people who didn’t ask to be there. In panic, over the last month companies around the planet have been sending out emails (often in violation of the very own GDPR) asking us if we would like to continue receiving junk mail.

Most databases are graveyards filled with outdated information often collected without permission and that reflect an obsession with wrong indicators and/or a clear case of the Diogenes syndrome: do not throw away anything ever, because “the bigger the database, the more useful it is”. As any company or organization that has tried to carry out marketing on this basis, a huge proportion of emails bounced back or went straight into the recipients’ spam folder. But very few companies have bothered to clean out their databases, and given the ridicule the Popular Party in Spain has faced now that it has finally been shown to have a membership just about large enough to fill a — not so big — soccer stadium, little wonder.

It’s not hard to understand why a political party would want to inflate its membership figures: and in the case of the Popular Party, which has been embroiled in myriad corruption scandals in recent years, this may have had as much to do with balancing its accounts. It appears that people whose membership had lapsed two decades ago were on the database, along with any number of deceased conservatives. It has been known for years that the party’s figures for its membership were a fiction, but nobody has been able to challenge the numbers, which only came to light during the primaries this week to elect a new leader.

A company’s database should be one of its main assets, assuming that the information therein is up to date and of real use. Marketing and sales managers concerned that the GDPR could impact their databases should take the time to take a long, hard look at them, because anybody who thinks that size is the only determinant for a database clearly doesn’t understand what the real purpose of one is.

The GDPR is providing a welcome shakeup after many years of junk mail abuse: if you don’t know who is in your database and why, then the first thing you need to do is stop sending out emails left, right and center to people who never asked to be there in the first place, otherwise you now face the risk of being reported to the authorities and being fined. Go through your database and eliminate everybody who didn’t specifically ask to be on it. Or better still, just trash the whole thing and start from scratch, this time following the right procedures.

Marketing is not about hunting victims or wasting time on people with no interest in your product (never mind the mental torture you’re inflicting on them), it’s about sus-tain-a-bil-i-ty. If you don’t understand this or you can’t be bothered to, then for your sake, for the sake of your company, and for everybody else’s, find another profession.

(En espa?ol, aquí)