Purpose - In a seminal article, Webster argued in 1992 (Journal of Marketing, Vol. 56/October, pp. 1-17) that some changes in concept and practice have fundamentally reshaped the field of marketing. He claims that customer relationships' are now the key strategic resource of a business. Strategic partnerships and networks are replacing simple market-based transactions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this claim in the context of various relationships maintained by the adidas® group.
Approach A detailed analysis was carried out to consider how the organisation has adopted a customer-oriented approach as their key strategy for improved business. This includes factors like increased loyalty of the customers, innovation in creation of new products, use of technology to maintain customer information and the importance of strategic alliances with other businesses.
Findings Customer Relationship management is an integral part of the marketing strategy in every organisation. Every department of the organisation works in a cumulative way to add value to the customer and thereby increase the efficiency of the organisation in terms of profits. Adidas® group has employed CRM as it core marketing strategy in both business-to-business relationships and business-to-consumer relationships using innovative products and latest technologies like mySAP-CRM.
Keywords - relationship marketing, customer retention, adidas® group
Introduction A Paradigm shift
The sole purpose of business Peter Drucker (1973) once famously claimed was "to create a customer". However, keeping the customer has become regarded much more important, since Dawkins and Reichheld (1990) reported that a 5% increase in customer retention generated an increase in customer net present value of between 25 percent and 95 percent across a wide range of business environments . This is the shift in paradigm that has been argued by Webster in a seminal article in 1992. He claims that customer
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