Opinion: Marketing Society - Look out for the bastardisation of buzz phrases

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been heralded as one of

the greatest advances known to man. Ten years ago it was ’total quality

management’, two years ago it was the ’millennium bug’ - the fin de

siecle mood, not the virus - and most recently ’knowledge management’

have kept us humming along to the latest buzz phrase.

Many of these have been bang on the money - with the obvious exception

of the millennium bug, which must rank as one of the greatest stings the

world has ever seen. However, the problem with buzz phrases is that they

begin to take on different meanings to those for which they were

originally intended.

CRM has for the past three or four years been shortened and transmuted

into ’Relationship Marketing’, the net result of which is that to many,

such activity has become the sole preserve for those campaigns involving

the use of databases or ’lists’. This is nonsense.

So why has it happened? Over the past ten years, the power of computing

has soared while costs have plummeted, which means that customer

databases, if set up and managed well, are the most potent tool a

business can have.

Companies can truly become ’knowledge-rich’ and exploit that knowledge

profitably. It is the tool by which current customer relationships can

be managed and the learning tool for acquiring yet more of the valuable

customer types.

However, just because these databases are powerful tools for managing

relationships doesn’t mean database marketing - usually meaning

personalised communications - is relationship marketing.

Tony O’Reilly once said: ’I’ll take the brands, you take the

factories.

We’ll get back together in five years and see who’s doing best.’ He was,

of course, proposing the brand-consumer relationship as a company’s most

valuable asset and their factories as their most dangerous

liability!

He wasn’t talking about databases; he was talking about bonding. Brands

have been successfully building relationships with consumers long before

anyone knew how to spell the word database, let alone build one.

Aren’t we all therefore relationship marketers? Client side, agency

side, design, sales promotion, new business development, research, ads -

you name it, we’re all playing the dating game. If whatever you’re doing

isn’t aimed at developing or maintaining brand relationships, I suggest

you are in the wrong business. But, of course, this wasn’t what CRM was

originally meant to be about.

Ultimately it was such a lack of understanding that led to the petering

out of integrated marketing - another buzzwagon of bygone days. At it’s

heart was a great idea; that the brand-consumer relationship was

sacrosanct.

Unfortunately it too became misunderstood as a term meaning

’co-ordinated’ campaigns; if you wanted to ’do relationship marketing’,

best get a DM agency in!

So next time you see a buzz phrase coming along, take care that it’s in

its original form and not in the agency-modified version.

Anyone want to buy some Totally Knowledgeable Quality Customer

Management for de-Bugged Millennium Relationships?

This article was first published on Marketing