You talking to me?

Astonishingly, retailers are still driving customers and prospects away with poor direct marketing, despite the fact that, in today's ferociously competitive markets, every customer counts.

Customers expect quality, choice, service, low prices - and they expect it immediately, yet many firms are still addressing them inaccurately and with invalid, untimely product information.

Why? The answer doesn't lie with a lack of technology. In fact, most marketers have simply not used the technology available that can improve their output: data mining and warehousing, customer self-service, smart cards, brand loyalty schemes, intelligent agents, intelligent profiling, multimedia touch points, sales force automation, and software for supply chain and customer relationship management.

There are, however, examples of intelligent and considered marketing, predominantly among fast-growing small and medium sized companies. These highlight the value of people and process over technology alone, in the struggle to improve direct marketing.

Ultimately, improvement requires organisations to have skills in place to bridge the gap between marketing and IT.

The detailed customer information needed by marketing departments is invariably 'owned' by IT departments. Traditionally, no one has explained the marketing value of this data and so investment in marketing systems has remained low.

Customers, not products, must now drive marketing. Their readiness and availability to buy should be driving marketing departments' output. Each customer must be allocated an individual marketing campaign, selling them the right product at the right time at the right price.

Yet people and processes aren't being developed to bring all the disparate technologies together creatively and cohesively to achieve this goal.

But some companies have, predominantly in the US. Marketers there have recognised that credit card services, phone lines, bank accounts, car insurance and so on are almost indistinguishable to consumers as commodities.

Their job then becomes to overcome consumer inertia with timely and personalised marketing, and make consumers move their custom around more.

In the UK, this ideal is still a long way off. We can only wait. In the meantime, as a consumer, expect more mass mailings and meaningless messaging.