I have just read an article on Mashable by Jamie Beckland called The End of Demographics: How Marketers Are Going Deeper With Personal Data.
The article explains how new sources of available data makes it possible for marketers to get a much closer look at potential customers and thereby going from delivering a broad message to a huge crowd to delivering a very targeted message to a small group of people with a high probability of getting a response. In short: Marketers are going from demographic marketing to psychographic marketing.
I believe this is true and ongoing (as I have also been involved in such activities).
The data quality issues we have always known in direct marketing is surely very similar in the psychographic marketing which is going on in the social media realm and in connection with eBusiness.
In my eyes, the concept of a single customer view is also a key to getting success in psychographic marketing.
You are not delivering a targeted message if you are delivering two different messages to two user profiles belonging to the same real world individual.
Your message will be very frustrating if you treat someone as a prospect customer if that someone already is an existing customer perhaps in another channel.
The effectiveness of psychographic marketing depends on a match between the psychographic variables, the behavioral variables and the demographic variables. As seen in the example in the Mashable article a good old thing as geocoding will be needed here.
An exciting thing in the rise of psychographic marketing is that it will add to the trend in data quality technology where it’s much more than simple name and address cleansing and deduplication. Rich location data will despite the virtual playground be further important. The relations between customers and products as described in the post Customer Product Matrix Management will be further refined in psychographic marketing.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 