Strategic Thought Transformation - The IIPM Think Tank

S T R A T E G I C I N S I G H T
example, a marketing manager may decide
to test response effectiveness at BDM contact
points to understand which contact
points (e.g. home address or business address)
generate higher response rate.
Business Contact Points (B-CP)
Each business can be contacted at multiple
locations. Contact points include address,
phone, fax & email. By far, the most commonly
used by direct marketers is address.
A business can have both physical as well
as mailing address. Some businesses will
have a delivery address which is different
from the physical address. It is useful to
separate these out so that you can measure
whether specific contact points are more
effective than others.
Business Decision Makers (BDM)
Each business can have multiple decision
makers. From a marketing point of view,
it is important that all of them are identified.
Data is available from various sources
that show for each business who the decision
makers are. In many cases, titles are
also provided. This is where the combined
corporate hierarchy as well as the marketing
hierarchy can be very effective. For
maximum effectiveness, it is important to
know where in the corporate hierarchy the
BDM has decision-making authority. For
example, a credit card company may want
to target the CFO in the Ultimate Company
for marketing a corporate card, while Principals
in each branch may be targeted for
a small business card.
BDM Contact Points (BDM-CP)
Each decision maker can be contacted at
multiple locations. Contact point types include
address, phone, fax and email. By far
the most common is address. A person can
be contacted at multiple points including
his/her business address, primary residence
address, vacation home address. Similarly,
a person can be contacted by phone at his/
her business, his primary or vacation residence
or by his/her cell. It is important to
be able to capture these so that you as a
marketing manager can decide what contact
points are most effective, and which
are NOT effective.
Differences between corporate
hierarchy and extended hierarchy
It is important to note that the extended
hierarchy is applicable to the entire universe
of businesses as opposed to the corporate
hierarchy which is applicable to only
about 10% of the businesses (since nearly
90% of businesses in the US are stand-alone
or have a single location). Also, while the
traditional corporate hierarchy contains
legal relationships, the extended hierarchy
contains both legal (e.g. a BDM relationship
to a company) as well as non-legal (e.g. a
BDM-CP relationship to a BDM).
Corporate Hierarchy Tree
In the extended hierarchy, in addition to
ultimates, subsidiaries and branches, Business
Decision Makers (BDM) Business Contact
Points (BCP) and BDM Contact Points
(BDM-CP) are also identified.
Extended Corporate Hierarchy Tree
In this article, we have shown how you can
extend the traditional corporate hierarchy
to for more effective marketing. In future
articles we will show how you can implement
this framework using a combination
of data & logic.
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STRATEGIC INNOVATORS
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