Consumers on the Whole Receive

¶ … Consumers on the whole receive more benefits than risk from marketers knowing their personal information

This paper suggests that when consumer information is stored and shared responsibly by marketers in a database, everyone benefits, including consumers. It asserts that quality and customer service improves because of the accumulation of such data. However, most of the examples cited by the article are actually of benefit to marketers more than consumers, such as the ability of a database to facilitate "lead generation, lead qualification, and sale of product or service, or maintenance of customer relationship" (Kotler, Keller p 162).

One of the quoted marketers clearly speaks from a self-interested perspective, when talking about making customers happy and providing them with quick and easy service through the use of a database: "As a direct result of the transition there was an increase in revenue due to the implementation of the customer database system" (Avrasin p59). Thus, many of the cited sources do not seem to support the theory being advanced by the paper. One quoted source is an analyst and vice president at Forrester Research, who obviously serves marketer's interests when compiling consumer database and helps marketers increase their bottom line.

The vice president points out the advantages of personalization to marketers through the use of database marketing: "This is an opportunity to exploit. In terms of customer touch points, fans engage with team brands, such as logos," in sports marketing (Beasty p 19). Of course, exploiting consumer's touch points is part of good marketing, but do the consumers wish to be so exploited? The article remains silent upon this point, and the consumers in question are not volunteering their team affiliations, instead marketers are keeping track of what teams the consumers support because of the ticket purchases made by the fans.

Personalization may be a popular trend and technique for marketers, but do consumers feel that the sacrifice of their information is worth it? This article does not really deal with the other side, namely the risks of having consumer information used irresponsibly. Even if quality and speed is improved, it does not say how storing consumer information supports this, or offers any substantiated data to back up its claim. The Forrester Research quote merely supports the idea that accumulating consumer data is useful to marketers, an idea that no one would deny, and the added speed conveyed by an effective data seems to only be the added speed that marketers are able to accumulate data and use it to their advantage.