Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Communicatio...

 

This article is an interview with Mike Hoban, customer and brand marketing director of Scottish Widows. Points discussed include the importance of understanding customers; 'behind-the-line' marketing ...

This article describes social networks, their growth and development, and the implications for marketing. The market is changing rapidly and remains unsettled. A key distinction is between 'open' and ...

The challenges Web 2.0 is posing to businesses are not coming from technology but from the kinds of relationships customers are demanding from companies. Markets have become conversations, and many es ...

Andrew Thomas, e-business director at Bounty, discusses the findings of a recent survey investigating the opinions and behaviour of today's UK mum. The survey revealed that despite changing lifestyles ...

David Williams, CEO of How to Experience (H2X), argues that many customer focus programmes simply pay lip-service to satisfying customer needs. Here he considers what is needed to define and deliver m ...

The Post Office is more than a brand: it is a British institution, trusted and used by huge numbers of the British public. In recent years, it has also undergone a dramatic transformation both in its ...

Social networking brands have now entered mainstream consciousness, with many enjoying explosive growth and mass press coverage. This growth was organic and viral, with individuals taking the lead. ...

This paper argues that in the modern social order, it is better to be talked about by others than to try to out-shout the crowd: namely, that engagement is preferable to control. The customer experien ...

Patrick Ohlin, brand director at CoreBrand, addresses the hot topic of customer experience management and provides five tips for getting down the path to a well-managed brand.

Robert Thurner, commercial director at mobile agency Incentivised, describes the formats included under the mobile banner and their current practicality as communication channels. He then gives some U ...

In this article, a hotel-and-airport horror story exemplifies what so often goes wrong with customer satisfaction (CSR). The main messages are: delivery is far more important than promise (and to prom ...

People are being bombarded with more commercial messages than ever before, most of which are not relevant to them; they cope by shutting these out, and the advertisers have therefore wasted their mone ...

It has been widely argued that the new consumer is active, knowledgeable, demanding, channel-hopping and, above all, experience-seeking. Yet market research often continues to survey consumers as if t ...

In this article we investigated whether a company’s recommendation factor can be increased by opt-in e-zines. A sample of 817 railway travelers was interviewed on the train. Using Reichheld’s (2001) r ...

In a business-to-business context in the auto insurance industry, the synergistic value of the continuum of relational-transactional data in developing interactive Integrated Marketing Communication ( ...

Market research has traditionally been the mediator between customers and companies, and has normally been based on techniques and processes that treat people as passive respondents. In the face of te ...

Consumer panels are traditionally one of the most important tools in carrying out market research, and the increasing prominence of the internet has the potential for engaging vast numbers of consumer ...

12 million adults across the UK have a reading age of 9 to 14. That’s the equivalent of being able to read the Sun. In other words, they can read and write, they just don’t read and write very well. P ...

This paper outlines how the market research industry needs to adapt to the new relationship between people and organisations. New information and communications technology are allowing people to becom ...

Today's OEM marketers must choose among a bewildering array of marketing corridors to reach consumers, with few established 'ground rules' to guide toward the best strategic choices. This paper discus ...

This paper looks at how trust, authority and science are currently 'communicated' in the pharma and other sectors. Semiotic analyses show how it is possible to leverage certain codes in order to build ...

Understanding underlying consumer needs and drivers of trust can help build intense consumer relationships. Exploring the consumer experience across CPG, automotive, financial services and other secto ...

Health care professionals have a high interest in patient follow-up research from both a medical and scientific point of view. Patient follow-up after surgery is crucial to good aftercare. Patients ar ...

Professor Merlin Stone and Neil Woodcock, of WCL (a change management and CRM consultancy), discuss a new model of customer management (CMAT) and good practice in customer acquisition, penetration and ...

For more and more companies, call centers were positioned as the hub of all customer service operations and the list of services provided via call centers expanded throughout the early 2000s. Used by ...

This article defines the integrated marketing process and shows how it can be used to improve advertising. It discusses how integrated marketing thinks about brands, the consumer experience with produ ...

By simplifying financial paperwork such as bills and statements, financial institutions can improve the customer experience, this paper argues. When viewed as branding's unsung heroes rather than as n ...

White points out that in spite of enormous budgets the financial services industry seems unable to inspire consumers to constructive action. Increasingly the business is driven by two imperatives: to ...

This article examines how societal shifts resulting in a better-informed consumer are changing the nature of the customer-brand relationship as well as the nature of branding building. As the importan ...

With the recent reissue of Lester Wunderman's 'Being Direct', Martin Thomas, a partner at Nylon, reflects on the insights and predictions of 40 years ago. He reveals that Wunderman's watchwords of 'p ...