If you read an article about customer relationship management (CRM) in the popular marketing press, you might finish it a little mystified about the difference between direct and
database marketing. In fact, CRM is one of those marketing phrases that takes on a life
of its own depending on the vested interests of the person writing about it. Consultants
will promote it as philosophy, strategy and systems that will solve their client’s headaches.
Academics have had relatively little to say on the subject, but will most likely focus on its
relationship building aspects. Commentators in the direct marketing world often use it
interchangeably with direct marketing.
CRM is important because rarely in history has so much money been spent by so many
clients on improving their marketing. The sheer size of the budgets has concentrated the
minds and the attention of CEOs and directors on marketing as never before. What this
means is that – and this is highly significant – the size of the investment has forced senior
managers to focus on what marketing departments and marketers actually do. This is both
an opportunity and a threat for the marketing profession: are they up to the challenge of
being in the spotlight in their lead role in ensuring returns on these huge IT spends?
CRM is also important because it provides us with an understanding of ‘the problem
large organisations have in focusing on their customers’. Unless you have worked inside
a big company it can be difficult to appreciate the way in which customers become somehow remote from the everyday life of many of the firm’s staff. Even in functions like
marketing departments, customers can be somehow lost in the ‘fire fighting’ of the latest product problems, or dealing with the politics of the research agency, or whatever.
Multiply this into every department in a complex company and then look at that complexity from the boardroom. Who keeps their eye on the ball in making sure the organisation stays focused on its original purpose – getting and keeping customers? The CRM
movement, flawed as it has undoubtedly been, has at least raised the visibility of the
need to ‘manage customers’ – or at least to remind people internally of the priority that
should be given to them