Marketing Made Simple

7	Customer relationship management

7.1 The essence of customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) was born out of the marketing concept. It is an extension of the marketing concept, which integrates a number of recent developments in marketing along with the increased technical capabilities open to marketing practitioners resulting from developments in the application of IT. From the mid 1980s more attention has been placed on long-term buyer–seller relationships. A new long-term marketing model, relationship marketing was introduced, first for service-based industries, then spreading to many other marketing situations.

Parallel with the development of relationship marketing came the development of the internal ...