Drilled to bits

I think I now know where CRM is going wrong.

A week or so back I was wandering aimlessly around my local Homebase as men have a tendency to do. Loitering by a stand for Black and Decker drills, and for no apparent reason, I remembered a long forgotten marketing lesson I was once taught-Black and Decker don’t sell drills...they sell holes.

And I think that is where those who deal in, advise on or practice CRM are going wrong.

Now if at this point you have no idea what CRM is-it stands for Customer Relationship Management and is the art and science of getting the right proposition to the right customer through the right channel at the right time.

In passing I should also point out that in many sectors the consumer does not want or seek a relationship and certainly does not want to be managed. So even the term is wrong for a start and at the very least we ought to be talking about Customer Engagement. However that is a whole other story.

More importantly, for as long as I have worked in marketing, and that is a very long time, marketers have peddled the idea of CRM to our businesses based on the futile premise of one-one marketing. Consequently the history of CRM over the past 20 or so years is littered with significant investment failures in CRM systems and programmes with only a few notable and well known cases getting this investment working properly: Tesco and its Clubcard being the best and most quoted case study in this space.

But like the man who wants a perfect hole and not a drill, businesses don’t want CRM but want and need more responsive marketing which generates a higher and increasing return on marketing investment.

But for too long many of us in the profession have talked about CRM almost as if it were an end itself. We have confused the art and science of the discipline with technology and computer systems. We have over obsessed on data and analytics. And we have positioned it as a standalone panacea to business ills.

Instead the data and the analytics, the technology and the systems should be seen as part of a process which results in more responsive marketing. A process which fuses meaningful customer insight with inspired creative to deliver personalised and relevant communications which are engaging and responsive.  In other words we should see the outputs from our CRM programme as the intelligence that powers the creative look and feel and delivers it where it will be most effective.  I call this intelligent marketing.

In this world CRM is not an end in itself nor a discrete and standalone discipline but is and must be seen as part of a greater whole. And this is how it ought to position and market itself. I would love it if I never saw or heard the CRM acronym again but instead we talked about intelligent marketing.

Marketers should strike CRM from their vocabulary and focus instead on intelligent marketing; stop talking about the process and start to deliver the benefits; in other words it is about holes, not drills.

CRM RIP.

And to think that this all started because I was looking at drills in Homebase.

But what do you think? All comments welcome.