Tomas Kohl is on the roll:
The real question was, indeed, how do we as a company manage to treat our customers with some sense of dignity without actually bothering to zoom in on them from the extreme wide angle (customer base, segments) to telephoto (households, individuals). Hence the effort to power up the operational CRM with capabilities of analytical CRM (that is, building some sort of number-based insight into the scary X-gigabyte swarm of operational data).
But the analytical CRM cannot build any meaningful “insight” into who your customers really are while treating the customer data as any other kind of transactional data. We humans are made of shape-shifting bits. We don’t stay transactional very long.
One of the reasons VRM may not be the best term (although there is good logic behind it) is that VRM is not just ‘flipping’ CRM but refocusing companies to a picture bigger than the transaction.
Companies look at the world around them, their markets and customers as if through a camera lens, their focus firmly set to macro or fish-eye. They only care about a narrow shot, zooming close, thinking pixels with replace understanding. (cp demographics, data harvesting, analytics etc) or receding far away from it (market research, analyst reports, industry-wide papers etc). The resulting distortion is familiar to anyone dealing with business.
The bigger (and richer) the company, the more expensive lens it can afford – one of those large long ones on professional cameras – the more distance from the object of their focus. Small companies have ‘cheaper’ cameras and end up being closer to what surrounds them although the camera makes sure they are not part of the picture.
To push the analogy even further, cameras are now widely available and affordable. Everyone can buy one and use it with reasonable competence. Amateurs can occasionally achieve good results with little digital cameras too and so photography is no longer the domain of the professionals. It is the same with tools that capture data and understanding of trends and behaviours – online simple, modular but effective tools match and outperform the lumbering business IT systems.
So companies are not the only ones capable of taking photos, we all can do that, often better than them.
The camera analogy brings out another aspect of companies’ interaction with the world – at arms length, from behind the camera. In my view, they should be part of the picture, swapping the camera with other photo snappers.
Crosbie Fitch
on Apr 5th, 2008
@ 14:29 pm:
I’d prefer a term that more clearly embraced the need to resume ‘markets are conversations’, and ideally ‘markets are conversations between peers’.
Maybe this could be termed ‘Peer Marketing’? Or if you really want to build upon an existing, somewhat related buzzword, ‘Peer to Peer Marketing’.
We all produce and consume. We are all vendors and customers. We are all traders. We all have relationships. We are all equal (apart from the elephantine golem in the room whose name is ‘Corporation’).