The Rise and Rise of CRM in Marketing
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Julian Thrussell
CRM is the marketing buzzword of the last few years, promising to revolutionise the way we work with customers. Every big bank, car company or utility now seems to have embraced the concept. Here is not the place to go into the full how and why of CRM (if you need a heavy lesson go to http://www.1to1.com/), so let's think about the difference it has made to marketing and how to make a start.
Once marketing was simple, some bright spark in product development comes up with a new widget, marketing tells as many people as possible about it and if we were lucky, someone would buy it.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) turned marketing on its head. From a simple idea a huge industry has grown. The first evangelist was Don Peppers who started talking about 'One to One' remembering individual customers and offering customised services based on previous history and identified preferences (mass customisation). After being ignored for a few years, suddenly a few US companies took note. Later, the little backwater that is UK marketing, picked up the idea from US companies working here.
Treat all customers as equals, CRM says forget it. Take your average company, 20% of customers provide 80% of profits, the bottom 25% loose the company money. CRM says dump the bottom 25% and you'll make more profits. Less customers is good….that was a new concept. CRM says keep the top 20% happy, your business depends on them alone. CRM says try and make the other 55% better customers.
