Strategic Thought Transformation - The IIPM Think Tank

CORPORATE H I E R A R C H Y
Learn how you can leverage data to
enable more targeted marketing to businesses
Sudip Chakraborty, Principal, Inductis
Designing a marketing database,
especially for businesses, can be
challenging. Compared to the consumer
world, this is still a relatively new
field with sparsely available expertise in
data, rules and models. This provides an
opportunity to sophisticated users to gain
competitive advantage in marketing effectively
to businesses.
In this article, we propose an extension
to traditional corporate hierarchies used in
many marketing databases & show how
you can actually implement this by leveraging
internal & external data, matching
and data integration rules and technology.
This article is intended for leaders in a marketing
organization including managers of
marketing databases, database designers,
data modelers & database architects.
Companies have been deploying single
view databases based on traditional corporate
hierarchies provided by data vendors
such as D&B and Experian for several
years. These hierarchies typically indicate
legal relationships between companies, e.g.
branches and subsidiaries. This information
can be very effective for marketing
especially for cross-selling. Other data
sources are also available such as DDM
(DUNS Decision Makers), EHA (Executive
Home Address) from D&B and BOL (Business
Owner List) from Experian that provide
information about decision makers.
Our experience in designing marketing
databases indicates that the traditional
corporate hierarchy can be extended by
integrating these data sources to enable
more targeted marketing.
A traditional corporate hierarchy consists
primarily of 3 levels of institutions :
Ultimate – The Ultimate is the top
most responsible entity within the global
family tree. The Ultimate may have branches
and/or subsidiaries reporting directly or
indirectly to it. For multinational companies
there will be a Domestic Ultimate as
well as a Global Ultimate.
Subsidiary – A subsidiary is a corporation
that is more than 50% owned by
another corporation and will have a different
legal business name from its parent
company. A subsidiary may have branches
and/or subsidiaries of its own.
Branch – A branch is a secondary
location of its headquarters. It has no legal
responsibility for its debts, even though
bills may be paid from the branch location.
It will have the same legal business name
Companies have
been deploying
single view
databases based
on traditional
corporate
hierarchies
as its headquarters, although branches
frequently operate under a different trade
style than the headquarters establishment.
A branch may be located at the same address
as the headquarters if it has a unique
trade style. This is traditionally the lowest
level of granularity of a business (business
at a location) and is the level at which a
unique business identifier (e.g. DUNS
number from D&B) is assigned.
This hierarchy was primarily developed
from a risk management perspective and
while it has been used by marketing organizations,
it does not fit there very well.
Marketing organizations are concerned
with identifying as large a universe of decision
makers as possible and identifying
all possible contact points for each of them
which this hierarchy does not provide. We
propose an alternate or extended hierarchy
that addresses these concerns.
The extended hierarchy can be considered
at the following 3 levels for each
business at a location:
Business Contact Points (B-CP)
Business Decision Makers (BDM)
BDM Contact Points (BDM-CP)
Some of this information, e.g. Business
Contact Points, is traditionally available
for businesses. However, due to the multiple
types and numbers of contact points
available for both businesses and people,
the information may not be used optimally
unless it is structured appropriately. Structuring
the corporate hierarchy in this manner
by integrating available information
will enable marketers to make marketing
decisions in a more targeted manner. For
An IIPM Intelligence Unit Publication STRATEGIC INNOVATORS 61