Relationship Marketing is emerging as a new phenomenon. However, relationship oriented marketing practices date back to the pre-Industrial era. In this article, we trace the history of marketing practices and illustrate how the advent of mass production, the emergence of middlemen, and the separation of the producer from the consumer in the Industrial era led to a transactional focus of marketi...

These are lecture notes for a course given by the authors during the program Automorphisms of Free Groups: Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics, held at the CRM (Barcelona) in 2012. The main objective of the notes is to describe Bonahon’s construction of Thurston’s compactification of Teichmüller space, in terms of geodesic currents on surfaces. In the final section, we present several extensions o...

If you had invested in an index mutual fund pegged to the Standard & Poors 500 at the beginning of 1990, you’d have done very well. But if you had invested in a fund consisting of companies that excel at customer management, your investment would have outperformed the Standard & Poors 500 by 300 percent! The lesson is clear: companies that actively manage and nurture their customer relationship...

How have cutthroat competition and high growth compelled telecom service providers to innovatively use social media to outperform competitors, improve customer communication and maintain loyalty? Why have service providers made huge investments in social media for their CRM strategy? This case study analyses how Tata DoCoMo used social media to positively influence customer experience. The case...

A fundamental proposition in marketing strategy is that a customer relationship orientation is positively related to customer value and firm value. However, the mechanisms of this relationship have yet to be explored in detail, especially in service industries. Our paper addresses this issue by proposing a model that identifies important intermediate variables between customer relationship inve...

In this paper we present a framework that aims to answer the central question why some organizations are successful in the CRM domain, while others are not. The framework is built on two foundations. The first claims that an organization’s CRM performance is positively affected by aligning CRM activities according to five business dimensions: strategy, monitoring and control, organization and p...

This study of hotels representing thirty-seven brands from fifty-six countries uncovers the market conditions under which investing resources in specific market strategies leads to higher performance. Specifically, the authors identified, for the first time in an international context, the circumstances under which customer orientation (acquisition, satisfaction, and retention of customers) alo...

We develop an integrated salesforce analytics application that combines enterprise data from human resources, compensation, and customer relationship management systems, produces predictive data-driven analytics insights to effectively manage organizations with many salespeople, and has an interactive visual interface that allows business users to explore the data and analytics at their own pac...

In this paper, we examine the impact of customer relationship management (CRM) on firm performance using a hierarchical construct model. Following the resource-based view of the firm, strategic CRM is conceptualized as an endogenously determined function of the organization’s ability to harness and orchestrate lower order capabilities that comprise physical assets, such as IT infrastructure, an...

This paper provides insights into assessing customer relationships in a revenue management environment and depicts methodological problems that may arise in this context. For this purpose, we formulate a multi-period deterministic linear programing model, which accounts for customers’ future demand behavior being dependent on the provider’s previous availability decisions. Moreover, on the basi...