Marketing & eBusiness, September 2000
Comment by Andrew Segar
The 'big five' consultancies have stolen the initiative from direct
marketers by taking database marketing - a concept DM pioneered - and
repackaging it as CRM. They then whispered into the ears of the CEOs
of multinational conglomerates.
Let's put aside what Customer Relationship Management actually does for a moment, and focus on CRM as a marketing phenomenon. CRM is essentially database marketing which has been around for a decade. What's more, database marketing is based on Wilfredo Pareto's 80/20 Rule (ie, 80 percent of profit comes from 20 percent of customers), devised some 100 years ago.
So why, in the space of two years, has CRM awareness and activity exploded ? How has the decidedly un-sexy craft of database marketing become the CEO's equivalent of Pokemon ?
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