Via Marketing Sherpa, here’s a  fascinating case study showing how banks use all that information on you they’re always trying to gather. The background to this is that Team Sony was trying to get people to sign up for the Sony credit card, which is issued by Capital One. One problem:

“We certainly don’t want them to be turned off to the brand because all of a sudden, they’re getting blasted with credit card solicitations from Sony. … We didn’t want to do anything to damage the relationship between the brand and the end customer,” he said. 

I, for one, would hate to live in a world where we’re getting blasted with exhortatory credit card proclamations, but that’s just me. Anyway, here’s the interesting part:

Now the team needed to understand the interactions customers were having amongst themselves.

To accomplish this, the team then enlisted a vendor to connect the internal data with information from thousands of open data sources, used to identify real customer connections

Connection types included:

• Place of residence
• Schools, colleges and universities
• Professional activities, like co-presenting at a conference together
• Travel, dining out, shopping together
• Social media activities, like sharing photos

By integrating this data, the team was able to determine “not just what happened within the Sony ecosystem, but how these individuals are behaving, how these individuals are connected to other individuals in the world, in the social graph,” he said.

In connecting the two, Rangwalla said the team was trying to “further our business intelligence … by augmenting that understanding and that intelligence with what’s happening in terms of interactions amongst our customers and those interactions that happen outside of our ecosystem.”

As a consumer, I’m not too happy with Capital One paying attention to whom I’m presenting with at conferences or whom I’m eating with, but as a former financial marketing data geek, I am truly impressed with what they did.

But wait, there’s more! Sony/Cap One, as part of this effort, targeted the “easily influenced”:

With the success of the first test on influencers, Rangwalla and his team decided to use the information to find another channel to target in driving credit card acquisition. 

“It’s almost the inverse of an influencer. It’s actually who is under peer pressure,” he said, meaning those people that are more likely to listen to other individuals, or take cues and advice from other peers. 

Rangwalla said this development in the campaign was natural to capitalize on how humans interact with one another. 

“In terms of a lot of advice, I turn to my father … he’s a good sounding board for me. He’s retired, he reads a lot. He’s a wealth of knowledge that I tap into,” he said, explaining that “by that definition, I’m under ‘peer pressure’ from my father because I tend to listen to what he says.”

To identify more easily influenced prospects, the marketing team used the same data to identify customers who had recently purchased a Sony product. Then, they identified other customers in the customer’s “friend network.” 

Using a combination of Sony ecosystem and social media data, the team was able to connect a customer who, for example, had just purchased a Sony camera, with someone in their friend network who had purchased the same, or a similar product soon after. 

Again, I’m not too pleased with this as a customer but my professional side is impressed.

Should you be worried about privacy? Having some idea about how this stuff works, I’m not too worried. First of all, this is still really hard to do in significant quantities:

One result of the campaign in targeting influencers was even though the team saw a significant lift of almost three times the control, it was within a very small population. 

“So though the [influencer test] worked, and it proved itself from a business perspective … we were not able to really move forward with it because the numbers ended up being so small and it just doesn’t end up being worthwhile. So it didn’t scale as well as we hoped it would,” Rangwalla said. 

With applying various suppressions, the team was left with a small population from within their larger list to find influencers. After applying response rates and conversion rates, the actual number ended up being not worth doing a follow-up campaign as of yet. 

This matches my experience. In a former marketing role at a large bank we came up with a technique to increase our response tenfold–but only on a very small subset of the population. Although with that said, the amount of data about you is growing every day, though I have no idea how difficult and/or expensive it is for banks to get this information.

The second point I would make–and this should be obvious to a lot of you reading this–is that just as they’re not looking at your multiple credit card applications, human beings aren’t really looking at this data either. Sure, if a bank employee with the requisite access level wanted to look at an individual’s data he could–but big banks do have safeguards against data abuse. Besides, if somebody really wanted to find out creepy things about you, he could just hire a detective.

So… who want to volunteer to be included in the next Sony card marketing project?