Letters: Help customers find love and they'll open up

31 July 2008

We're increasingly aware of the value of our personal data and are more reticent to give it up cheaply. This is frustrating for many businesses as, without customer data, they can't be as effective in servicing customers' needs and their business suffers.

How can we get customers to give data about their likes, status and concerns, explicitly and for free? Or even better, can we get them to pay us? Priests, doctors and shrinks are all experts at this game, as are dating agencies. The more we tell them, the better they can give us what we need.

So what about dating? Every business has customers. Every customer needs a mate. Ergo, every business should have a dating agency. It's an over simplification, but brands will survive by the quantity and quality of their business intelligence and CRM.

With a dating application you can engage a section of your customer base with the hottest user-generated content available - love - tuning the profile fields to extract precise information so you can target your offerings and messaging better.

The killer app of the future is the portfolio of detailed consumer profiles. Online dating agencies have the technical infrastructure and socio-psychological profiling skills to extract, store and analyse this data, and so increase customer equity.

We get the data, they get the love. A fair trade I'd say.


From Rudy Tambala, head of internet and innovation, Ministry of Sound

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