Customer relationship management has become common currency among CEOs and board of directors, and is widely regarded almost as a panacea for the plethora of challenges confronting today's organizations. In this article, we consider what happens to organizations and their considerable investments in customer relationship management programs when a recession hits the economy. To this end, we examine the customer relationship management programs that Stig Jørgensen & Partners, Scandinavia's largest consulting firm specializing around loyalty-based business solutions, has been involved in over the past years. We considered only programs in Denmark. The findings are interesting for both academicians and managers. The former now have a better understanding of what is regarded as best practice among consultants, while the latter know what to do, and what to avoid, during a recession.
Customer relationship management has become common currency among CEOs and board of directors, and is widely regarded almost as a panacea for the plethora of challenges confronting today's organizations. In this article, we consider what happens to organizations and their considerable investments in customer relationship management programs when a recession hits the economy. To this end, we examine the customer relationship management programs that Stig Jørgensen & Partners, Scandinavia's largest consulting firm specializing around loyalty-based business solutions, has been involved in over the past years. We considered only programs in Denmark. The findings are interesting for both academicians and managers. The former now have a better understanding of what is regarded as best practice among consultants, while the latter know what to do, and what to avoid, during a recession.
Since marketing first emerged as a distinct business and management phenomenon between the First World War and the Second World War it has changed profoundly. The focus was originally on gaining customers: The challenge for businesses was to set up production facilities in order to meet a growing and unfilled consumer demand and to employ marketing techniques to capture consumers who entered the market (e.g., Buttle 1996; Christopher, Payne, and Ballantyne 1991; Palmer 2001). This approach to marketing has become known as transaction marketing or 4Ps marketing (see for example Borden 1965; Culliton 1948; Sheth and Parvatiyar 2000) with the marketer being regarded as the blend of the product, price, place, and promotion. In the 1950s and 1960s, growth was stimulated by a rise in consumer demand and disposable income, as well as mass advertising, and technological developments resulted in the production of new and innovative products.
In the 1980s, however, the validity of the 4Ps micro-economic framework was being questioned and said to be of mixed value outside of the North American market where market and product situations often would be different (De Ferrer 1986; Grönroos 1994; Gummesson 1999). Also significant was the series of oil crises that changed the business landscape abruptly in the 1970s. |
