CMD - Direct and Database Marketing Tool

Challenge

CMD has identified the need for a business service and product offering to remain competitive with local and national creative agencies. The company requests the design and develop a competitive, industry standard, direct and internet based marketing system.
 

Solution

The development team conducted competitive market and service analysis in addition to reviewing current security and advertising law for the business case of the DDMT (direct database marketing tool). The team conducted system and software research to determine the proper platform and development environments that met the service and feature requirements while also meeting the investment cost limits. The development team devised a phased development strategy that coordinated with a business and marketing strategy that expand the services offered as new systems were developed.
 

Results

The development team successfully developed a direct and internet based marketing system that was used for over three years with increasingly complex marketing campaigns. The success of the system was greatly influenced by the sales and marketing strategies employed by the company and not the technical performance of the system.
 

Robert's Thoughts

This project provided an opportunity to introduce the CMD development staff to the concept of business analysis and system modeling. We conducted internal review and analysis of the system, business processes, and system architecture. Sadly this project was plagued with budget cuts and resource reduction throughout the development and during the production phase of the system. From the beginning of the development of the service political disagreements overshadowed the many successes. This caused inefficiencies and increased problems meeting performance and profit goals for most of the campaigns conducted using the system.

Throughout the challenges the system went through the system went through four development phases. Each phase provided more sophisticated and stable services and features. Sadly at the point that the system was finally ready for production the management structure changed and increasing political pressure suspended the use and development of the marketing system. Management directed the department use direct and internet based marketing services from expensive 3rd party vendors. This decision was primary focused on legal issues surrounding CAN-SPAM compliance and legal liability of customer and client data.