Yet few brands have managed to achieve anything like success in this area.
There are even noises from some quarters of the industry that a single customer view is an unnecessary and unrealistic goal; trying to collate and interrogate such a large chunk of data is a cumbersome process, and not relevant in the ever accelerating pace of the digital marketing age.
The argument here is that small, manageable elements of data should be more than enough to inform good direct marketing, ensuring relevance of content and timing, without the potentially huge investment needed to make a single customer view work.
So if voices within the industry are happily of talking themselves and their clients out of the business of attempting to create a single customer view, should we all give up the quest, and focus our attention on a more hand to mouth method of acquiring useful data and using if effectively?
In a word, no. A single customer view may for many brands be the database equivalent of climbing Mount Everest, or landing a man on the Moon -- its difficulty doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
The reason I believe we should continue encouraging brands to seek single customer view perfection is because of the very nature of the changing direct marketing landscape.
Specifically, the rise of the internet and associated digital channels has created a significantly large array of communication channels for marketers to use.
While this is of course a positive step, the fact that there are so many choices available means the challenge of managing the use of these channels has also dramatically increased.
Brands can communicate with their customers and prospects through any number of channel permutations, and consumers can likewise interact with brands using any and every channel they choose to.
This widening of the number of formats in use mean it has never been more vital to have a joined up view of each individual customer -- a view where everything we know about them is available in one place.
What are their channel preferences, what is their transactional history, have they received the brand's latest brochure in the post, was their call to the customer service line rectified to their satisfaction?
All these elements paint a complete picture, and provide the brand with a clear view of who the customer is, and how they can be satisfied and engaged.
Simple? Many would argue no -- the example above contains such incongruous shards of data that recording them, bringing them together and crucially storing them in a format that can easily be interrogated for future use is no mean feat.
However, just like the evolution of traditional direct marketing into a glossy, multichannel, digital-driven powerhouse of marketing and communications techniques, we in the data sector have also been building on our world-beating skills by innovating in the way we handle customer data and insight.
If data was a language, we not only wrote the dictionary on it -- we scripted and stared in the movie, carried it up Mount Everest, landed it on the Moon, and bought the t-shirt.
There's no denying that achieving a single customer view is a challenge for any brand.
There may be necessary structural changes that need to be made to bring the relevant areas of a business together, and a shift in philosophy to recognise the value in and importance of this process will also be important.
But without taking these huge leaps forward brands risk being left behind when customers begin to differentiate between those which show a genuine understanding of them, and those which show no sign of joined up thinking.
Ally Scott, business development manager, Alchemetrics.