Fragment 38: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment

Steps along the Customer-Relevance Superhighway. A role in the launch of the world's very first CRM suite?

As in the previous fragment, we’re back in the second half of the ‘80s. To remind you of the period … in 1985, Microsoft introduced Windows. In 1986, in the U.S., the world’s first laptop computer was demonstrated. In 1989, Intel launched its 1.2 million transistor-based 25 MHz 80486 chip. In February ‘89, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa suborning the murder of author Salman Rushdie for supposedly offending Islam. Blasphemy hogwash was clearly in the air because, in April ‘89, Madonna released a video of her song ‘Like a Prayer’ that caused a storm among religious groups: the video, they contended, was blasphemous, and Madonna lost her Pepsi sponsorship as a result.

The fine readers of Aargh!: Gawd! People were crazy back then!
Myself: Well, if you think they were crazy then, you’d have to say they’re completely stark staring bonkers now.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Well, maybe. Oh, and you forgot about the other storm.
Myself: The other storm?
The fine readers of Aargh!: The meteorological one.
Myself: Oh yes, night of the fifteenth-sixteenth October ‘89 - Britain hit by a violent extra-tropical cyclone. Caused a lot of damage, that.
The fine readers of Aargh!: And there was power dressing.
Myself: Uh-huh.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Padded shoulders out to here and hair-dos like steel helmets …
Myself: Alright, alright …
The fine readers of Aargh!: … and the mullet - you must remember the mullet!
Myself: Will you, please, just stop. I am not trying to do a complete run-down on the 1980s; rather, just a quick reminder to set the scene for what was happening in my own backyard.
The fine readers of Aargh! (disappointed): Oh, well, suppose you’d better get on with it then.
Myself: Thank you.

---

Sometimes, it’s only a long time after an event that one realizes it was something of particular significance and importance. This is just such an instance.

I’m talking about the creation and launch of what I think may have been the very first Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Others may have been contemplating something similar at the time but this was a real, fully functioning system that may have been the first ever of its kind. And I and my team played a part in its launch.

Okay, CRM systems may not be everyone’s cup of tea but, boy, have they played an important role, directly and indirectly, in the way that our business and social systems have evolved. They are a fundamental part of the whole box of tricks, if you’ll forgive that expression, that evolved to enable businesses to interact ever more closely and intimately with everyone in a digitalized world.

You may recall that, back in the latter half of the 1980s, a chap called John Doff and I had set up an agency specializing in the writing of ‘long copy’: that is, the words for brochures, film scripts, direct marketing materials and anything else that featured more words than your typical advertisement. And fully producing those materials when required, as in the case I’m about to outline.

Write Solutions, for that is what we named our little outfit, initially operated from a small office suite right next door to the building in London’s Fitzrovia where I had recently taken up residence. It made the commute quite straightforward. Later, we moved to offices on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street. That meant a ten-minute walk to work. What a struggle life was.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes … one day, Jenny, one of our small team, announced that we had the opportunity to maybe get some work from a consultancy called CACI.

I’d never heard of CACI and set out to do some due diligence before we went to meet them. It was more difficult back then - Google didn’t even exist.

CACI, I learned, originally stood for California Analysis Center, Incorporated and then became Consolidated Analysis Center, Incorporated.

Oooh! Something to do with computers and computing, huh? Something a lot of us marketers of the time were suspicious about. There was a sort of perceived conflict between the creative ‘art’ part of our endeavours and the rational ‘science’ aspects of it all.

Anyway, so far as what CACI actually did, all I could find were references to the provision of services for the U.S. Navy, particularly a thing called the Aegis Combat System, ‘an integrated naval weapons system used to track and engage enemy targets’.

What the heck were we in for?, I wondered.

It became even more intriguing when we got there because the two people we met, Managing Director Clive Humby and Marketing Director Edwina Dunn, didn’t mention a damn thing about defense systems.

Rather, they talked about marketing.

Then, early on in our conversation I realized that this guy sitting opposite me had played a major part in the development of the ACORN classification system. Wow!

I may, stupidly, have had reservations about computing moving into marketing but I was fully onboard with ACORN. It’s an acronym formed from the initial letters of A Classification Of Residential Neighbourhoods and was the postcode analysis system that, inter alia, was helping transform direct marketing into a hugely more intelligently-targeted system than it had previously been.

Some direct mail may still justifiably have been labelled ‘junk mail’ but believe you me it was a lot more random and junk-y before ACORN came on the scene.

And this was clearly just a beginning so far as Clive and Edwina were concerned. Their vision and ambition went much, much farther.

One step along the Customer-Relevance pathway, that my team and I were privileged to have a role in, was the launch of …

See, that image shows how early it was - at that time no-one had yet come up with the term Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. Rather, we talked about …

Database Marketing: the manipulation of organised customer and market data on a computer-based system to achieve efficient market planning and direct marketing solutions.¹

“On a computer-based system” - don’t you just love that. And we got to create and produce the brochure and other materials for the launch. The text included this:

You have to unlock the data to ‘know’ who your customers are, and to understand their changing needs. You have to respond to those changing needs - fast!

Getting customers. Keeping customers. Getting new products for the customer. Getting new customers for the product. Being totally responsive. These are the key prescriptions for successful marketing and successful business as we go into the 1990s.

Database marketing is all about harnessing the knowledge that you already have - and creating a system that will accept new and updated information - in order to turn it into real marketing power.

But imagine having all of that knowledge … sorted into a market-usable format … installed in an advanced and user-friendly computer system … enhanced, if you choose, with other up-to-date demographic knowledge … and located, not in a remote bureau, but right in your department.²

The fact that that last phrase was necessary demonstrates how new the idea was that a computer system could escape the great air-conditioned computer bureaus of the time and actually function in a normal office environment.

And I can’t resist including the shot that we took of Clive Humby OBE, as he subsequently became:

Not long afterwards, Mr Humby and Ms Dunn (also, now, an OBE recipient), aka Mr & Mrs Humby, moved on from CACI and, in 1989, re-sorted their names to set up Dunnhumby Associates.

Over the next few years, alongside helping clients to get to grips with the marketing opportunities that digitalization was opening up, they published regular updates titled Computers in Marketing. These helped enormously to alert and prepare enterprises to get to grips with the future. I think, not least, that i shuld have paid more attention.

Then, in 1995, they introduced one of the next major innovations on the Customer-Relevance Superhighway - the Tesco Clubcard. The rest is …

---

The fine readers of Aargh!: You’ll forgive us making the point, we hope, but isn’t that a rather esoteric example of a society-changing influence?
Myself: Perhaps, but the events that move things on are not always blindingly obvious.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Hmm.
Myself: I’ll give you another example. On 30th June 1948, in the U.S., Bell Labs announced that, thanks to three chaps called Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, they had invented a thing called a transistor. With hindsight, this was a momentous event but, at the time, it got just a tiny mention buried on page 46 of that day’s New York Times. Even six years later, the transistor was still thought to be just of interest for military communications and hearing aids. Then, in 1954 Texas Instruments produced the first transistor radio, yours for just $49.95 … only to promptly abandon it! Presumably they thought the transistor would never out-compete the valve or vacuum tube which was the established technology of the day. But someone thought differently! And it wasn’t the American communications giants of the day - RCA, Zenith, Philco. Rather, it was a company that had been founded just a few years earlier, in 1946, in Japan. Sony. So, when, in 1960, Sony started using transistors in televisions, it marked the demise of the U.S. consumer electronics industry.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Fair point. (pause) Did they sell a lot of the Market Master thing, then?
Myself: I don’t know the total but I do recall that a British High Street bank actually signed up for it at the product launch. That caused some jubilation.
The fine readers of Aargh!: The smart looking branding and materials helped, I should imagine.
Myself: Absolutely. The graphic design was the work of my esteemed friend Jerry Shearing. We have a long history that now spans half a century.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Okay, okay, we don’t need to hear fifty years worth of stuff.
Myself: Fine. But you will get to hear some of the relevant bits in this series as we go along.
The fine readers of Aargh!: Have you got any saucy bits?

Thanks for reading.

1. Market Master product brochure. Produced by: Write Solutions. Design: Jerry Shearing. Copy: Write Solutions.

2. Ibid.