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Foreword The View from Here
It's been five decades since I first started studying and writing about marketing. Back then, the Industrial Age was in its prime. Manufacturers churned out products on massive assembly lines and stored them in huge warehouses, where they patiently waited for retailers to order and shelve boxes and bottles so that customers could buy them. Market leaders enjoyed great market shares from their carefully crafted mass-production, mass-distribution, and mass-advertising campaigns.
What we all learned from the Industrial Age is that if an enterprise wanted to make money, it needed to be efficient at large-scale manufacturing and distribution. The enterprise needed to manufacture millions of standard products and distribute them in the same way to all of their customers. Mass producers relied on numerous intermediaries to finance, distribute, stock, and sell the goods to ever-expanding geographical markets. However, in the process, producers grew increasingly removed from any direct contact with end users.
Producers tried to make up for what they didn't know about end users by using a barrage of marketing research methods, primarily customer panels, focus groups, and large-scale customer surveys. The aim was not to learn about individual customers but about large customer segments, such as “women ages 30 to 55.” The exception occurred in business-to-business marketing, where each salesperson knew each customer and prospect as an individual. Well-trained salespeople were cognizant of each customer's buying habits, preferences, and peculiarities. Even here, however, much of this information was never codified. When a salesperson retired or quit, the company lost a great deal of specific customer information. Only more recently, with sales automation software and loyalty-building programs, have business-to-business enterprises begun capturing detailed information about each customer on the company's mainframe computer.
As for the consumer market, interest in knowing consumers as individuals lagged behind the business-to-business marketplace. The exception occurred with direct mailers and catalog marketers who collected and analyzed data on individual customers. Direct marketers purchased mailing lists and kept records of their transactions with individual customers. The individual customer's stream of transactions provided clues as to other items that might interest that customer. For example, in the case of consumer appliances, the company could at least know when a customer might be ready to replace an older appliance with a new one if the price was right.
As the twentieth century progressed, direct marketers became increasingly sophisticated. They supplemented mail contact with the adroit use of the telephone and telemarketing. The growing use of credit cards, and customers' willingness to give their credit card numbers to merchants, greatly stimulated direct marketing. The emergence of fax machines further facilitated the exchange of information and the placing of orders. The Internet and email facilitated direct marketing. Customers could view products visually and order them easily over the phone or online, receive confirmation, and know when the goods would arrive.
As the 21st century drove interactivity between customers and companies, and among each other, even companies that don't really understand social networking realize they have to get on board. If 33 million people are in a room, you have to visit that room.1
But whether a company was ready for customer relationship management depended on more than conducting numerous transactions with individual customers. Companies needed to build comprehensive customer databases. Companies had been maintaining product databases, sales force databases, and dealer databases. Now they needed to build, maintain, mine, and manage a customer database that could be used by company personnel in sales, marketing, credit, accounting, and other company functions.
As customer database marketing grew, several different names came to describe it, including individualized marketing, customer intimacy, technology-enabled marketing, dialogue marketing, interactive marketing, permission marketing, and one-to-one marketing.
Modern technology makes it possible for enterprises to learn more about individual customers, remember those needs, and shape the company's offerings, services, messages, and interactions to each valued customer. The new technologies make mass customization (otherwise an oxymoron) possible.
At the same time, technology is only a partial factor in helping companies do genuine one-to-one marketing. The following quote about customer relationship management (CRM) makes this point vividly:
CRM is not a software package. It's not a database. It's not a call center or a Web site. It's not a loyalty program, a customer service program, a customer acquisition program, or a win-back program. CRM is an entire philosophy.
—Steve Silver
Whereas in the Industrial Age, companies focused on winning market share and new customers, more of today's companies are focusing on share of customer, namely, increasing their business with each existing customer. These companies are focusing on customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction as the important marketing tasks, and customer experience management and increasing customer value as key management objectives.
Various kindred customer-focused efforts are more than just an outgrowth of direct marketing and the advent of new technology. As the Interactive Age progresses, mass marketing must give way to new principles for targeting, attracting, winning, serving, and satisfying markets. As advertising costs have risen and mass media has lost some effectiveness, mass marketing is