The Golden Record in Marketing: Advantages, Challenges, Opportunities

Many of us know the term “Golden Record” in relation to the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, the music industry, and IT, but what does the Golden Record have to do with marketing? We aim to answer precisely this question here. Furthermore, we will show you how to effectively use such a golden dataset for your marketing and what future prospects are already emerging today.

The Ultimate Dataset

The Golden Record in marketing describes the ultimate customer dataset, meaning the data point where all information about a (potential) customer converges. In current practice, data about a single person interacting with our company is usually stored in multiple systems that typically have nothing to do with each other. This leads to many individual pieces of information, duplicate entries, and data that cannot be meaningfully attributed to a single person. Good examples include newsletter sign-up data, records from online purchases, data from the service centre, and general enquiries that come in via email, for instance. Thus, a person usually has different information stored in various systems. In many cases, this makes personalised, precise marketing almost impossible.

The Golden Record is the one central dataset that consolidates all scattered information about a customer.

With such a central customer dataset, the quality of the collected data increases, and companies have very accurate and usable data about their target audience available. In practice, this allows us to communicate in a targeted manner and, not least, saves a lot of time, as the laborious task of collating entries is eliminated.

The Advantages of a Golden Record in Marketing

• A central customer dataset enables us to:
• understand customers better
• refine a coherent buyer persona
• seamlessly track the customer journey
• gain a 360-degree view of our target audience
• better manage and coordinate communication with our customers across multiple channels
• address customers in a targeted manner
• increase customer satisfaction
• more accurately control marketing and communication campaigns
• expand cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
• create better reports
• derive sound analyses and future scenarios from them

All in all, a consolidated customer dataset therefore holds enormous potential for development, growth, and revenue.

How to Create a Golden Record?

One thing is clear: creating and maintaining a Golden Record is not an intern's task. We must disappoint anyone who briefly considered this option at this point. The good news is that there are better, more accurate, and automated systems for this. These are called MDM (Master Data Management) systems and act as a data turbocharger for businesses. Master Data Management systems are solutions that allow a company to collect information from different data systems in one place, and then cleanse and consolidate the extracted information. This solution is based on a set of rules with clear workflows that structure the collected data, relate it to each other, and prioritise it. What already sounds complex when reading it is also complex in practice. Because before the MDM tool can start its work (ideally in real time), the conditions for the aforementioned rules must first be thoroughly considered and implemented.

Challenges in Consolidating Customer Data

The biggest challenge in implementing such an MDM system is therefore thoroughly considering and creating the processes. You need to consider all data sources, which input fields are available, which data sources generate more reliable information, and how the individual input fields relate to each other. And ultimately, there is also the question of which data source gets data sovereignty over an entry. An example: The data field "Name" appears in the online order form, newsletter registration, and competition opt-in. Which field do you now attach which importance to? Is "Name" a first or last name? Which data source has the decision-making power for the Golden Record? You see, even with the common input field "Name", the first complex questions already arise.
Bringing together data with different input fields, and thus understanding that these different datasets refer to one and the same person, is another central challenge. How can the MDM know that the phone number from system X belongs to another dataset from system Y (e.g., name and address)? These steps must be considered beforehand and "taught" to the system.
No matter how well thought out our workflows are and how well the data is cleansed, there will still be no getting around a human data manager. There will always be datasets that need to be evaluated, cleansed, and merged by people.

From Customer Golden Record to Golden Profile

We have already highlighted many advantages of a Golden Record in marketing above. We would like to particularly emphasise one here, as its importance is becoming increasingly clear: the 360-degree perspective on our customers. Creating a 360-degree customer view and thus a unique customer profile is the logical next step in consolidating and utilising customer data. However, bringing the diverse information and touchpoints of a customer into a single profile is complex. Unlike the classic Golden Record, not only master data but also behavioural data are relevant for creating a "golden customer profile".

FOR A GOLDEN PROFILE OF YOUR CUSTOMER YOU NEED:

• the master data from the Golden Record
• data describing the customer, such as demographic information, needs, preferences, wishes, etc.
• any customer-related behavioural data such as orders, payments, dwell time, active touchpoints, click behaviour, etc.

Important for such a Golden Profile, in addition to sufficient qualitative data, would also be the ability for this data profile to communicate with the linked systems. That is, if the dataset changes in one system, not only should the corresponding entry in the profile change, but all other datasets for the same information in other systems should also adjust. So, it's about the synchronisation of all existing datasets across all systems. Only when this two-way communication of data is enabled will a real-time picture of a 360-degree customer emerge. This means a lot of work for our business processes and communication systems. Big Data and AI will play a central role in this, because especially in the B2C sector, the speed of data generated across various platforms can hardly be managed manually. It remains exciting to see how quickly and, above all, where the discussion and practical implementation in this area will develop. Above all, the question of data security will certainly gain momentum in the coming years as a result.