Remember when businesses were bought and sold on their "goodwill" value? When the business owner had such a good relationship with customers that they could be sold along with the business as a going concern? The days of the customer relationship have been making a steady comeback.
In recent years, the likes of Unilever, Kimberley-Clark, Save & Prosper and Allied Domecq have rediscovered the healthy bottom-line addition a good relationship with customers can bring.
This rediscovered skill is called Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. The object of CRM is to transform production led businesses into consumer focused entities that can assign balance sheet value to their customer databases. A by-product of the 80’s and 90’s phenomenon of direct marketing, CRM has added new vigour to many mature markets and reinforced the value of customers to the long-term viability of many businesses. Through the capitalisation of consumer databases, large scale capture and management of
