Why Is Customer Relationship Management - 1953 Words

How and why is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) important to sports marketing managers? Introduction Since the early 1990s, the concept of relationship marketing has been promoted by academics, which centres on one-to-one relationships between parties. With the increasing competition in the global market and the development of marketing theory, especially consumer behaviors, relationship marketing has made way for the idea of CRM (Smith and Stewart, 2014). This idea is also consistent with the core of sport marketing, which is to ‘satisfy the needs or desires of sport consumers’ (Smith and Stewart, 2014, p.2). In the sport context, CRM ‘involves the use of information technology to create and maintain ongoing, long-term†¦show more content†¦Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to explore why CRM is important to sports marketing managers and how to successfully implement CRM systems. The first section focuses on the economic and social effects of CRM. Then take the nature of sport into considerations, the second part presents a strategic framework for C RM with five processes, during which new waves of CRM in sport marketing will be emphasized, such as branding strategy, emerging social media, the idea of CLV (customer lifetime value) and so on. The ‘R’ in CRM stands for ‘relationship’, which means the aim of it is to create strong connections between consumers and sport organizations, ultimately increase great value for both of them (Knox et al., 2007). Even though CRM has been criticized for conceptual confusion along with abuse in practice and there is little evidence that customers universally have the desire to maintain relationships with particular organizations (Buttle, 2007), a number of benefits could be derived from successful CRM. Four main ones are highlighted as follows. Increase Working Efficiency and Save Expenses First of all, the staff could share information about both current and potential customers by gathering data from the standard CRM system quickly and easily, including preferences, behavioural patterns and shopping habits. Furthermore, based on the analysis of such significant information, sports marketers may predict new opportunities at a lower