Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management

Media neutrality is by no means new to the marketing industry. The key behind the drive for a neutral approach has been clients' desire for accountability. As budgets tighten marketing departments are being told to account for the money they spend and to prove ROI. It is this request for proof on investment that has driven many clients to consider the more measurable media. This paper takes the mystery out of methodologies behind the integrated approach and looks at how clients and agencies should be working together for the best of the brand, not just the award-winning television campaign.

It is recognised that deciding on how to deal with the Internet is one of the major strategic challenges that businesses face today. Within a short period, the Internet has emerged from being a niche medium used by a minority of individuals, to being a mainstream channel used by millions of people and businesses globally. Moreover, the Internet is being used to gain competitive commercial advantage worldwide, removing market and geographical barriers of entry. This study examines the attitude of business-to-consumer companies towards the use of the Internet in order to establish whether it is simply fashionable to use this medium or whether it is a fundamental for successful relationship marketing. To supplement a literature review a postal survey was conducted among all the client companies of Prime Response, a major supplier of database marketing software for customer relationship marketing (CRM). A total of eleven companies (31 per cent of the census) took part in the study. The research concludes by suggesting that the Internet is both a fad and a fundamental for relationship marketing at the moment. It is recommended that the Internet should be used as an integral part of a business's overall strategy and, as a channel, managed in conjunction with all other channels that a business uses.

We demonstrate the use of decision tree induction, employing both C4.5 and Profit Optimal (SBP) algorithms, to discover profitable locations for a young startup firm to sell their product, pet insurance. We use publicly available data including US Census data and veterinary surgery location data as our data sources and use the potential profits generated by each of the algorithms as key performance metrics. We show how our findings link to general business behaviour and performance, by describing the implications of our findings for marketing strategy at the pet insurance company.

The application of analytics to the gaming industry is not new; some of the most advanced analytics I have seen has been carried out in casinos. What has changed is the application of these analytics to customer management and the richness of the data that is now available to support these activities. In the past, casinos focused on gaming behavioral data, usually collected through the use of gaming-based loyalty schemes. But as casinos evolve into resorts with hotels, retail malls, food and beverage outlets, and major entertainment locations, the richness of data is exploding. The issue now is that of how one collects, integrates and uses this customer data. This article, part one of two in a series, explores some of the issues that need to be addressed if casinos are to leverage the valuable asset that is the data that they have on their customers, or patrons, as the industry likes to call them.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study into the implementation of data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. Seventeen companies are investigated and three short case studies are presented. It is found that clean customer data are essential to successful CRM performance and that technological support for data acquisition, analysis and deployment are not widespread. Clean customer data enable CRM strategies to be both more effective and more efficient, yet not all companies are investing in improving data quality.

This paper considers the extent to which data protection legislation in the UK and EU has achieved its original aims, explains some proposed changes to the UK Data Protection Act 1998 and developments in EU legislation, and takes a brief look at the data protection legislative regimes in the APEC countries and the US.

Web and e-mail are producing massive amounts of data, but only a few organisations are able to recognise their customers within these mountains of bits and bytes. Even fewer companies are really using the knowledge they can collect from in- and outbound e-mail and log files from the web. The reasons for this lie not only in the quantity of incoming data, but also in the fact that web and e-mail are often not yet integrated with other media and operational systems of the organisation. The unprecedented opportunities offered by web and e-mail in real-time interaction with customers are thus not used although, for many Internet players, actionable customer knowledge is their only value determining factor. Real-time database analysis can help in this.

The digital revolution has led to firms with massive amounts of information. Thus, the storage, collection and appropriate use of such data is a major challenge for firms as they struggle to implement profitable integrated marketing communication strategies. Given this, the goal of our article is to analyze the types of customer-based data that organizations can collect to learn about their customers and determine methods by which the collection of such information can ensure higher data quality for use in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)-based systems. Our work also studies the relative value of each type of data in developing higher quality customer data and superior CRM systems. These data tell managers how to organize their priorities in terms of data learning activities to create the highest quality CRM data so that improved performance can ensue. Our findings show that capturing the results of personalized communications and detailed transactions of customer interactions will yield the highest results and perhaps should be the organization's focus.

Business-to-business (B2B) companies invest in customer relationship management (CRM), integrated with sales force automation (SFA) to achieve a return on investment, through improved sales force productivity, sales revenue, costs, customer satisfaction, process accuracy and customer knowledge. However, the devil is in the detail. CRM and SFA are multi-faceted. There are two main obstacles to successful implementation. One is the need for the customer to get some benefit out of the system; the other is ensuring that employees who are expected to use the system actually buy-in to its benefits, including what benefit they will gain as individuals. However, much planning is needed to manage the risks involved. The ‘benefits dependency network’ (BDN), 1 designed to develop routes to successful implementation of IT, has been tested in CRM projects. The factors for success in CRM implementation in B2B companies, where the sales force must be involved, are many and varied, including proactive sales management, creating champions, consultation, training, incentives and culture change. Practicalities such as incremental application of the technology and a wide portfolio of metrics to monitor progress are also critical. In the light of the special considerations of sales force involvement, the authors propose an adaptation of the BDN to suggest a generic map for the implementation of CRM (with SFA) in B2B markets. This paper is based on the authors’ secondary research for two commercial sponsors in the utilities sector, supplemented by the authors’ extensive experience of working in this area.