Designing a marketing database, especially for businesses, can be challenging. Compared to the consumer world, this is still a relatively new field with sparsely available expertise in data, rules and models. This provides an opportunity to sophisticated users to gain competitive advantage in marketing effectively to businesses.

In this article, we propose an extension to traditional corporate hierarchies used in many marketing databases. In future articles, we will show how you can actually implement this by leveraging internal and external data, matching and data integration rules and technology.

This article is intended for leaders in a marketing organization including managers of marketing databases, database designers, data modelers and database architects.

Companies have been deploying single view databases based on traditional corporate hierarchies provided by data vendors such as D&B and Experian for several years. These hierarchies typically indicate legal relationships between companies, e.g. branches and subsidiaries. This information can be very effective for marketing especially for cross-selling. Other data sources are also available such as DDM (DUNS Decision Makers), EHA (Executive Home Address) from D&B and BOL (Business Owner List) from Experian that provide information about decision makers. Our experience in designing marketing databases indicates that the traditional corporate hierarchy can be extended by integrating these data sources to enable more targeted marketing.

• Ultimate – The Ultimate is the top most responsible entity within the global family tree. The Ultimate may have branches and/or subsidiaries reporting directly or indirectly to it. For multinational companies there will be a Domestic Ultimate as well as a Global Ultimate.
  
• Subsidiaries – A subsidiary is a corporation that is more than 50% owned by another corporation and will have a different legal business name from its parent company. A subsidiary may have branches and/or subsidiaries of its own.
  
• Branches – A branch is a secondary location of its headquarters. It has no legal responsibility for its debts, even though bills may be paid from the branch location. It will have the same legal business name as its headquarters, although branches frequently operate under a different trade style than the headquarters establishment. A branch may be located at the same address as the headquarters if it has a unique trade style. This is traditionally the lowest level of granularity of a business (business at a location) and is the level at which unique business identifiers (e.g. DUNS number from D&B) are assigned.