There are Responses and then there are Responses

Today, we will cover something simple.

This thing has been bugging me since we started assigning responses to our promos.

It starts with the realization that one needs to track responses as uniquely as possible and assign these responses to the specific promo to measure effectiveness.

That is well and good.

So we assign Unique Identifiers to the records and unique Source Codes and Cell Codes to make that data as granular as possible. We hope that this information is printed or attached somewhere so it comes back to us with the same integrity with which it left.

When the response comes back we hit several brick walls that prevent us from assigning the response flags effectively.
1) The unique codes were conveniently ignored at the vendor fulfilling the campaign and now we are left to match names and addresses and emails to figure out who actually responded.
2) Data Entry folks are not rewarded for correct entry than quick entry so a significant portion of the response now has to be again matched back using steps described in 1.
3) Finally, the offer to A was forwarded to B and B used it. Do we credit A for the response or B and if we wish to credit B how do we we did not send any promo to B?

I have talked about this the last 15 years to dozens of Clients and to organizations where I owned processes and databases. But I failed utterly to change any process because of the number of seemingly imponderables.

The most significant one, it seems, is an organizations inability to change their existing process to add the three new pieces of data to the output files that would drive fulfillment processes at third party locations.

The next significant is the organizations inability to change a manual process to a automated process based on scanning labels containing this data which would clearly be more accurate and fast.

The last one is an organizations inability to see response beyond the single dimension of promo to response. I had to by most part ignored any response where I could not match the offer to the response.

In this day and age of the internet, I wanted to bring this third limitation to the fore for discussion because this dimension is the most important. You send and offer and someone responds, that is obvious and straight forward. But here we have a situation where someone was sent an offer and someone else has responded. Who is this responder how did he or she get this offer? This can be interesting but wait, who is the offer to? This is even more interesting.

Here is a person we should look through "Loyalty" lens. This person did not only respond, and yes, it should count as his response but he gave it to someone as an ambassabor of the brand.

We need a way to structure and look at response dimensionally and our CRMs need to enable us to do this. As we start collecting this type of data and analyzing their impact on our business, I think we will learn more about rewarding relationship with our customers that go beyond bean counting and traditional cross-sell/up-sell.

I would like to see almost 6 dimensions where response can be captured:
1) Individual level
2) Couple Level (identifying husband/wife together or cohabiting partners)
3) Family including children
4) Friends
5) Company Coworkers
6) Company

I am sure if we start working with this, we might think of other layers but this would be a good start.

Will this work? Is it to hard to do this?
What do you think?