This article reflects on the author's career in database marketing and customer relationship management, explaining what took him into this line of work over 30 years ago and identifying the main changes in client requirements that he has observed.

Cause-related marketing (CRM) benefits brands, consumers and society. In emerging markets where social upliftment is an imperative, CRM could provide an avenue through which those in need receive more support than can be provided by traditional means. Although considerable research on CRM campaigns and consumer responses to them has been undertaken elsewhere, not much has been done in the South African context. This study examines consumer responses to CRM, and in particular, seeks to investigate whether the consumers’ level of involvement with a cause and the way in which the message is framed influence purchase intention. Using factorial ANOVA, the study found that cause involvement significantly influenced purchase intention while message framing did not. There was no interaction between cause involvement and message framing.

The main objectives of this article are: first, to present the evolution of collaborative demand planning approaches such as Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment and Demand-Driven Value Networks to Demand Sensing, and second, to identify the benefits that Demand Sensing can generate for the Consumer Goods Organisations (CPG) industry. After synthesising the relative literature on the above collaborative approaches, three case studies are presented to identify the benefits of the Demand Sensing approach. The conclusions of the case studies, as well as the findings of a survey on CPG organisations in the United Kingdom and the United States, are combined in order to design a framework that organises the benefits derived from Demand Sensing into various functional areas.

Social contacts are an essential part of everyone's life. With today's mass of advertisements on every thinkable media, people get overloaded with product information. Considering the variety of offers, it is hard to get an overview and is extremely time-consuming to find an appropriate product. In this media-dominated world, we tend to go back to the very simplest form of getting trusted information by asking friends for recommendations and advice. To follow this trend, marketing strategies need to incorporate this trend. A possible consequence is to identify social networks and integrate the additional information into Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Social network analysis provides basics to describe these networks, but how can they be used to increase customer loyalty and therewith increase profit? Telecommunication is probably the most important method of communication in today's globalised world. Using social media while on the go has become as normal as reviewing emails during a train ride. As communication is an essential part of keeping contact with our social ties, telecommunication service providers must have attractive options to incorporate social networks into their marketing strategies. Because of the saturated telecommunication market, customer retention has become one of the key strategies in this industry. Considering trends in today's international telecommunication market, customer segmentation has been identified as the key to successfully using social network analysis in CRM. In this article, we propose a social network-based segmentation to identify strongly connected customers with high influence on their social network. This approach enhanced with churn predictive modelling techniques is a powerful instrument to prevent churn. Using these methods in a loyalty project at a mobile telecommunication company we achieved impressive results. We provide empirical evidence that loyalty programmes based on social networks can decrease churn und increase revenue at the same time. We applied the proposed method to define the right pricing model and the appropriate usage of social media. Our aim was to accumulate social communities on a single provider by giving the right incentives to customers with high social influence.

This article examines the tension between efficiency and customer experience management in retailing. It concludes that one way forward is to give customers the tools to manage their own experience. To put it another way, in these industries, it is up to the customer to manage their own experience. In some industries, such as complex financial services, regulatory barriers prevent self-service, on the grounds that advisors know better than consumers what the latter need. However, these barriers will eventually collapse as consumers use improved information technology, including advising each other via social media, to identify products that they want, at the right price. Where customer service is concerned, suppliers will increase their focus on efficiency and margin, and seek the win-win of self-fulfilled customer experience with minimised human intervention from staff. Consumers will be provided with ever more sophisticated information and communications technology, particularly but not solely by suppliers who use a multi-channel approach. Younger consumers’ strong preferences for buying in their own way will eventually pervade most markets. Suppliers who fail to come to terms with this will lose market share to those who lead in applying information and communications technology to support self-service. Eventually, the self-fulfilled experience will be the norm, except in most difficult and risky purchases. Even here the role of human intervention will be minimised. Consumers will increasingly use their own technology, especially smart-phones, to identify the best offers, make comparisons between products and services, and receive offers from national and local suppliers. For more complex products and services or buying situations, expert third party diagnosis of customer needs will be replaced by self-diagnosis.

This article's objective is to study the evaluations toward a country image, identifying groups of consumers with different underlying reasons for these evaluations. This is a descriptive and quantitative research, which applied the personification scale in a sample of Brazilian executives. A cluster analysis was carried out based on the respondents’ scores for the country image dimensions in order to identify different reasons for the bad evaluation of Brazilians about Chinese products. Two different respondents’ profiles for China's negative assessment were identified and it was seen that the bad evaluations are because of different scores attributed to the image dimensions named as ‘Underdog’, ‘Economic Value Seeker’ and ‘Quality and Satisfaction Seeker’. As for a practical implication, Chinese companies that are interested in marketing their products in Brazil should develop special communication programs, with the goal of reducing the negative bias that consumers have with respect to Chinese products.

Brand advertising is suffering as a result of social networking on the Internet. This is true both of its speed of reaction and its ubiquity. This process is not helped by the fact that service providers are themselves served by a range of different companies and disciplines, each of which brings slightly different emphases to the equation. These include creative and media agencies, Digital/Direct/Customer Relationship Marketing agencies, specialist social media support boutiques, consultancies and technology vendors. The solution is likely to be a far more collaborative future, in which the various skills from Data Analytics, Planning and Creative work together in new geometries within a range of support agencies. Traditional account manager-led strategy is likely to reduce: so, too, is hard data-based analytics, to be replaced by a combination of insight-based analysis backed by data and informed by creative principles. The role of social communities built in online worlds is likely to grow as well.

Corporate Blogs are fast emerging as new organizational tools for marketing, building brand relationships and Customer Relationship Management. This study has been conducted to analyse the ability of an organization to use its Corporate Blog as an e-CRM tool. We attempt to study the impact of brand communication (content type and volume), hosted on an organizational blog, on its ability to induce consumer engagement. Organizations can build relationships with their prospective and current consumers through posts on a Corporate Blog, and encourage them to participate by commenting on the blog, thereby stimulating consumer engagement. The variation in the organizational objective behind hosting each post on the blog is used to categorize the content posted on the blog. An exploratory study enables us to deduce the importance of content typologies in building a relationship with the customer. We are able to identify three types of content typologies – Organizational, Promotional and Relational. We further observe that Relational content hosted by an organization is able to induce greater volumes of consumer engagement (measured in terms of number of consumer comments) than any other content typology. The analysis of dependency of consumer engagement on the volume of content posted by the organization indicates a positive correlation between number of posts and volume of comments.

An important new report ‘Return on Ideas’ has been published recently. Its subject? How any organization that has to market itself can be more efficient, effective and value adding. The report is solidly based on candid research on over 100 organizations, large and small and across industries, and is packed with practical suggestions, checklists and case studies. This paper summarizes some of the key points.

In this paper, qualitative research is conducted to gain insight into the current application and potential of database marketing in a newly emerging African economy, Tanzania. It is found that database marketing applications in Tanzania are currently limited, but that there is potential. The most promising industries are banking, insurance firms and the mobile phone sector. However, the development of database marketing in Tanzania may be hindered by lack of suitable data warehouses, lack of statistical knowledge, and insufficient knowledge on the application of client data and statistical output for marketing applications. The paper discusses the implications for Western firms.