My name is Bart Foreman, President and Founder of Group 3 Marketing, a boutique, a direct marketing agency located in Minneapolis. We started this business 24 years ago as a loyalty marketing company. That was really the hot buzzword and we made some pretty good programs over the years for a lot of specialty retailers and marketers and then one day we woke up and we had an epiphany and that epiphany was people aren’t really loyal. They’ll bolt for a penny. They’ll bolt if you don’t smile.

Se we reinvented ourselves and we became a relationships marketing company because CRM and relationships were all the buzzwords back then and we still did loyalty programs. We said we want to create relationships, lasting relationships for our clients with their customers and then we had another epiphany and that epiphany was our customers don’t want a relationship with us. They want good service. They want value. They want a quality product. They do want you to smile, but at the end of the day they don’t want a relationship. They want results.

We on the other hand, the business community, your clients, printer’s clients they want desperately a relationship with all their customers. Why? It’s not about loyalty. It’s about retention. It’s about holding onto the customers I have. So in the last two years we’ve sort of reinvigorated our company again and reinvigorated our mission not around loyally, not around relationships, but around analytics and we’ve really become a very strong data mining company of taking our clients’ data and making use of it because all data is, is a lot of points. What we do is the usual stuff. We turn it into information. We then try to turn that into knowledge and then we turn that into insight and God willing, we turn it into action with our clients and that’s the process.

So now we’ve become a strategic, analytical and tactical driven company with the driver being analytics. That creates a strategy. That creates the pathway and then from there we can create tactics to execute and that’s the action part that started all the way back with data.