The first stop for the one stop shop

The future for data lies in delivering solutions – from data cleaning to bespoke prospect pools. It’s the one stop shop, but of a very different kind from the one we are familiar with today. Prospect Swetenhams’ Annette Holmes shares her vision of the customer knowledge business.

There was a time in direct marketing when the idea of offering everything from design to enclosing was a mantra. The One Stop Shop, as it came to be known, saw a brief spell of mergers and acquisitions which created a few major conglomerates who genuinely could offer it all. But it didn’t last. On paper it looked good, but in practice clients seemed to be happy to buy their creative in one place and their poly wrapping in another. Companies very quickly went back to their ‘core competencies’ – and the One Stop Shop became a debating point once again.

But in the field of data the concept is still attractive. Data is at the heart of so much activity – including areas such as research and new product development. Clients expect more from their suppliers than ever before, so they have to be able to develop a range of core competencies which can meet all the demands likely to be made upon them – from the supply of fresh accurate data to campaign analysis. Not so much the One Stop Shop, but an end to end process, with the data supplier able to offer solutions to its clients at any stage along the customer journey.

Says Annette Holmes, managing director of leading UK data provider Prospect Swetenhams: “Data, unlike many other areas of direct marketing, is one discipline where it is possible to provide everything a client might require. Not only that, but there is an exponential benefit to be gained, as new insights into the data can be developed. As you clean, update and enrich a data set, each process, managed in one location, has a cumulative effect. There is a totality that we can provide which is greater than the sum of its separate parts.”

One of the UK’s leading list brokers and managers, Prospect Swetenhams is an expert in these disciplines, trading over 130 million names a year. “Our proposition has been built on these core competencies,” says Holmes. “What we’ve added is an enhanced analytics offer and ‘best in class’ account management skills to create an integrated, customer-led solutions approach. It’s about making our client’s objectives our own objectives. It’s about working side by side with our clients as strategic data partners to drive their customer knowledge - and from that deliver more profitable business. ”

Prospect Swetenhams has been investing in its people and in new product development, all of which will show its first fruits later this year. But already there are signs that the new approach is bringing benefits to the company and to new customers. Says Holmes: “We’ve already won significant new business from demonstrating our ability not just to provide data, but to provide insight as well. That’s not what we’ve been associated with in the past: it is what we’ll be increasingly associated with in the future.”

Among the new areas being explored are far more sophisticated B2B data models, adding predictive techniques to identify the most likely new business leads (work carried out in association with Prospect Swetenhams’ sister company, the B2B data specialists Market Monitor), but also developing new B2C tools, including bespoke databases. These take as their starting point a deeper understanding of a client’s existing customer database. They then use this as the starting point to identify the best sources of prospect data, including the building of dedicated pools, which enable greater levels of targeting – but also a more sophisticated analysis of the customers and prospects themselves. It’s these insights which add even greater value to the offering Prospect Swetenhams can provide.

To make this more effective, Holmes sees the forging of new links with its own clients and prospects as the key to unlocking its own future as a major customer knowledge company. “We want to work with clients – and their agencies. But most importantly we want to work with people who want to unlock the value in their customer base. It’s a partnership approach – not just one of supplier and buyer. If this approach is to have any value at all, it must be in the ability to add knowledge at every stage, and that has to be the goal we are all striving to reach.”

There was a time, Holmes notes, that creating a turnkey solution for a client would have a cost which only the most major players could afford. Today that’s no longer the case, and building a dedicated solution is an option for many more businesses. “When Ford first built cars the famous line was that you could have ‘any colour as long as it was black’. Today cars come with extra options which you can choose from to customise your own vehicle. Data is going the same way. The one colour approach is gone. You’ll still need the specialist advice of a data expert, but they’ll help you get the most from your data – and deliver a service which is tailored to your own needs. That’s service – and it’s coming soon. Very soon.”

This article originally appeared in Direct Marketing International