nr 414 zeszyty naukowe uniwersytetu szczecińskiego 2005

NR 438 ZESZYTY NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU SZCZECIŃSKIEGO 2006Giuseppe Cataldo 1A NEW WAY TO UNDERSTAND MARKETING – THECUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENTThe New Digital FrontierThe strong development of information technologies and telecommunications during the lastdecade, and their influences on economic and social activities in the developed countries, causeda great change in the world we live in, leading to the birth of a new society; the ‘information society’,formed by a social-economic context in which the main goods exchanged is information. Bycombining Information and Telecommunication, Information Communication Technology (ICT)comes out.Basically, ICT creates a new environment in which the information exchange dominates anyprocess and operation carried out by public, private and commercial operators; such informationexchange may work just by the employment of new information tools, among which the main one is,without any doubt, the ‘network’ that allowed operators to connect each other.During the last decade, the market has deeply changed because of the rapidity with whichtechnology offers new tools to improve progressively the planning and management of an enterprise.The market has changed, passing through several steps, moving from a product-oriented logic, witha mass production, to a consumer-oriented logic. Indeed, while in the past, the focus was on theresearch of standardized products that could be distributed on the market irrespective of consumers’needs, nowadays the trend is completely opposite. The customer is the main core of all businessactivity and the subject on which the attention has to be focused; he is not a passive element of theprocess but an active element whose needs must be known by the enterprise management in the aim ofplanning the product strategy.In the early ‘80s, the new criterion of managing market relations was the pull logic, also becauseenterprises noticed that the coordination of distribution channels with push logic, that centralized theproduct and not the role of the client, was ineffective. The pull logic (figure 1), instead, focused theattention of all sector operators on the end-consumer.This marked change in the way to understand the market has urged enterprises to conceive a newmanagement criteria, based on the intensive use of information in the aim of satisfying precisely themore and more new and different consumer’s needs.Moreover, the technology evolution has made these changes possible, also through several factorssuch as:– the personal computer diffusion,– the digitalization process spread around the world throughout information, images, music,communication and other intellectual forms or expression,– internet as a universal standard of data transmission system development,– the progressive market globalization,– the increase of service offer as a complementary factor of product offer,– quality and service level as growing competitive advantages,– production and organization decentralization among enterprises,– automation.1 Giuseppe Cataldo – Faculty of Economics, University of Bari – Italy.15