Page 100 - merged.pdf

•80 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

may be surprised to find that there are a number of brands of four packs of beer on
shelves beside the disposable nappies. The reason for this is the discovery, made
possible by relational databases, that a large number of husbands and partners get a
phone call towards the end of the working day requesting that they pick up a packet
of disposable nappies on their way home. So the supermarket manager wheels out
the four packs and tempts the father into impulse buying a beer to go with the
evening television.

This is possible for the supermarket to work out because of the high degree of
data integration available to it. There are at least three systems involved in this piece
of analysis – the stock control system, the checkout system and the loyalty card
system. This strategy is part of the movement towards what the marketing people
call ‘the market of a single person’, where the supplier has access to such a large
amount of accessible data that it is able to target a market of one person with the
attributes the supplier believes fit the product it is trying to sell.

The technology involved in this has developed over many years. Indeed, some
computer salespeople claimed some 25 years ago that what we have now was avail-
able then. The underlying technology on which such specific marketing depends is
the database and database management systems.

A woman moved to London from Edinburgh. She lived in West Hampstead
and worked in the city. Everyday she commuted to work by tube, from Finchley
Road to High Holborn. The tube was her only method of transportation for the first
few months of her stay in the new location.

After three months if you had asked her how to get to High Holborn from
Finchley Road, she could confidently have told you to go past Swiss Cottage to
Regents Park. From there make your way to Baker Street and Oxford Circus. She
could have directed you all the way by the place names of tube stations, but asked in
which direction to walk to start the process of getting to Swiss Cottage she might not
have known. That is what computer life was like before databases.

The computer world before databases relied on traditional file processing. Ap-
plications systems reflected the previous manual environment. For example, the