Towards a Successful CRM Implementation in Banks: An Integrated Model.

In recent years, customer relationship management (CRM) has been the favoured theme for numerous studies and reports. Yet, there is a lack of systematic empirical evidence regarding the critical success factors (CSFs) for the CRM implementation, the activities that are affected by the use of the CRM programmes, and their consequent performance outcomes. In this article, we document the role of the CRM programmes in the banking sector and identify marketing activities that are affected by CRM usage. Taking a sample of 159 banks that utilise a CRM system, we found a substantial positive effect of the CRM usage on relationships effectiveness and marketing objectives. The results of this study have major implications for marketing people, as they suggest the notion that the CRM critical success factors should be implemented holistically rather than piecemeal to achieve the full potential of the CRM. The findings also stress the central role of customer services in the successful implementation of CRM programmes within banks

Do Social Media Investments Pay Off? Preliminary evidence from Swiss destination marketing organizations

ocial media has become a dominant subject in tourism and hospitality research. Given the importance of social media in the customer journey, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) need to understand the effectiveness of their social media activities. This paper analyses the relationship between DMOs’ marketing spending and staffing and various social media key performance indicators (KPIs). We used an online questionnaire to collect data about social media activities and respective marketing budgets of DMOs in Switzerland for the reference year 2014. We also gathered social media KPI figures of the five main social media platforms used by these DMOs (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram). Our results suggest that DMOs’ investments in social media (allocated resources for marketing, online marketing, and especially social media) correlate with identified metrics for measuring social media success

The return on tourism organizations' social media investments ::preliminary evidence from Belgium, France and Switzerland

Literature suggests dozens of ways of how to quantify the success of social media. However, there is no consent about the measurement of the return of investment (ROI). Only very limited empirical work is looking at the topic especially in tourism. This study is one of the first attempts to look at the ROI of tourism organizations. In doing so, various input (i.e. budget, manpower, amount of platforms used) and outcome (i.e. posts, website success and social media KPIs such as number of posts, interaction, and page performance index) variables are analysed. Responses of 150 tourism organizations to an online questionnaire and social media data collected via the monitoring tool Fanpage Karma provide insights for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Our data indicates that despite an ever increasing importance of online services for the customer journey, the monetary and manpower resources allocated to online marketing and social media is modest for most tourism organizations of the three surveyed countries. The achieved outcomes of the tourism organizations are weak especially when it comes to engagement figures. Revealed relationships such as between marketing budget and success measures for YouTube videos are presented and a discussion is provided

Pricing ROI, pricing capabilities and firm performance

Pricing is not only an important activity but frequently also a very important expense for industrial companies. In this short article we examine whether an improvement in measuring the return from pricing (pricing return on investment (ROI)) leads to an improvement in pricing capabilities and firm profits. The answer to this question is not trivial: performance measurement is costly and could, at least in theory, reduce performance. We survey 166 marketing and pricing managers from business-to-business companies globally and find that the effectiveness of pricing ROI measurement is positively related to firm performance only if pricing capabilities are well developed. This article offers two contributions: it explores the concept of pricing ROI, and it documents a positive link between pricing ROI and firm performance. To the ongoing debate on antecedents of pricing capabilities this research thus adds a further, so-far unexplored, perspective