Marketing

Having your customers comment on your policies, products or employment practices is one thing. Having them suggest ideas for improving said policies and products -- in a public forum where participants can vote on these ideas, no less -- is an entirely different matter. How well a company can handl...

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but al...

Microsoft's annual lollapalooza of a conference, Convergence, has come and gone, but the blogs it triggered live on. The team behind Microsoft CRM Live -- the on-demand application scheduled to be released later this summer -- has been particularly prolific, with "how-to" posts on the company's late...

The proliferation of marketing channels and globalization remain key challenges for every organization. Digital content continues to expand at exponential rates as new marketing channels surface. CMOs and marketing executives are looking for ways to deliver more than simple asset repositories with c...

Amdocs has introduced a new lineup of service offerings designed to help its customers make the transition to marketing their own products and strategies in the digital medium. Amdocs began realigning its product portfolio in this direction last year, when it introduced the Customer Experience Syste...

Scanning the RSS feeds from the blogs -- many of which are all about the benefits of Web 2.0 providing greater customer intimacy and building trust with customers -- one begins to wonder if telemarketing is on its way to becoming obsolete. I asked a group of marketing vice presidents and directors a...

Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that la...

The proliferation of marketing channels represents a key challenge for every CMO seeking to optimize return on marketing investments. Today, the marketing department is tasked with maximizing return across dozens of marketing channels. The use of multiple technologies results in silos of valuable in...

Competing for customers has never been more challenging, intensely focused or costly for manufacturers globally. Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product line extensions to marginally increase a given product's market size and potential sales, manufacturers must get bac...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specif...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just mu...

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers. I got to thinking about this after watching the movie "Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finc...

I own an iPod. Do you? If so, do we have anything in common? Apple is hoping that we do, and it's providing plenty of room for us to find out at the iTunes Store. There, music lovers can write and read reviews of artists' recent, and not-so-recent, releases. Perhaps more commercially important, they...

B. Joseph Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time. Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre &...

The new year is here and marketers are putting the finishing touches on their budgets and plans for 2008. However, before we move forward, there are some trends from 2007 that are worth continuing in the coming year. One trend that is top of many minds is the increased focus on customer relationship...