People have been proclaiming the wonders of database marketing for many years now, but the vast majority of companies have yet to realize its significance or to implement it in any significant way.
  
Manufacturers used to obsess over market share. Which they assumed meant program ratings, eyeballs, and other quantitatives in their media advertising. Today, they talk about sales trends and emphasize the importance of POS data. Indeed, they have spent enormous amounts of time and money collecting data and have vast amounts available.
  
Yet asked if they are making best use of the available data to shape their sales strategies, they say they do not have time to analyze the data. They admit that it is not really data they wanted. It was data-based analytical results. It was insights that could lead to new strategy formulations.
  
The question is not how much data you can harvest. It is what you do with that data. It is how you pursue your database marketing. This realization is slowly sinking in, and I look forward to more data-based marketing in Japan.
  
Shimizu Nobuo
System Communications