Merlin Stone

St Mary's University, Twickenham · Insitute of Business Law and Siociety

This short paper considers the issue of environmental supply chain transparency of retailers. It explains why progress on environmental issues in the retail sector depends not only on what retailers do, but on what their suppliers do. It explains the role of supply chain information in helping diagnose environmental supply chain issues, and how cre...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions (HEIs) faced serious challenges that raised concerns about sustaining the quality of education delivered to students and the quality of the graduates produced. Many HEIs throughout the world were unable to sustain the quality of teaching and learning due to many issues including lack of cl...

This single-volume reference provides an alternative to traditional marketing research methods handbooks, focusing entirely on the new innovative methods and technologies that are transforming marketing research and practice. Transcending the old divisions between qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book is an essential tool for mar...

This chapter summarises the main themes covered in this book, in particular the relationship between insights derived from "big data"-the high volumes of data arising from digital interactions between firms and customers, between firms (in partnerships, supply chains and distribution relationships) and between customers themselves (in social media...

This chapter focuses on the evolution of marketing practice and on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to strategic marketing decision-making, in managing the marketing mix, and in marketing research. It concludes that the use of artificial intelligence offers opportunities to marketing researchers, but that it may also disrupt the busi...

This chapter explains an approach to researching the needs and perceptions of older adults regarding the idea of the smart home. It investigates differences in attitudes towards and usage of smart devices between current older adults (average age 75-80) and the next generation of older adults (the baby boomers). Although the sample was small, the r...

This chapter investigates how the adoption of different business models affects what marketing researchers do. After defining the concept of business model, it explores the dependence of different business models on marketing research and customer insight. It investigates the implications for analysis of how business leaders use information to revi...

Purpose This viewpoint article considers the impact of the latest developments in information and communications technology on the automation of and support for marketing and sales. It compares the situation in business to business and business to consumer markets and identifies the similarities and differences between the two. It compares the situ...

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to show the relationship between changes of industry business model on the supplier side and changes in business model on the client side, using the information technology industry as an example. This is the first paper to investigate supplier-side industry-wide business models and identify their consequences...

Purpose This paper aims to review the information management aspects of the early months of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) coronavirus 19 outbreak. It shows that the transition from epidemic to the pandemic was caused partly by poor management of information that was publicly available in January 2020. Design/meth...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show how the business model of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry has evolved and the general differences that evolution has made to information management. Design/methodology/approach Literature review was carried out accompanied by conceptual analysis. Findings It shows that chan...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the relevance of academic research, in terms of the topic match, to commercial practise in information technology, using the case study of a large and very rapidly growing supplier that uses leading-edge management approaches, Salesforce.com. Design/methodology/approach Academic literature review and...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review literature about the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic situations and identify the research that is needed in the area of applying AI to strategic marketing decisions. Design/methodology/approach The approach was to carry out a literature review and to consult with marketing ex...

The aim of this note is to understand how content relating to marketing and market research is distributed to and within universities. The focus of the study includes the behavior of all those in this market for information, namely suppliers (whether content generators, aggregators, packagers, or distributors of content) of marketing research, univ...

Purpose This paper aims to explore the problems of managing superprojects and identifies how a different approach to controlling them can reduce the incidence of cost and time overruns and benefit shortfalls. Design/methodology/approach Literature review accompanied by conceptual analysis. Findings Project cost and timing overruns and benefit sho...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the rise of geospatial data, its importance for business and some of the problems associated with its development and use. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews a certain amount of previously published literature but is based mainly on analysis of the very large number of responses to a consu...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the main characteristics of what have come to be called information nations and to identify some of the determinants of success in becoming an information nation. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a critical review of the literature and of secondary data on information technology and...

(B2B) şirketleri, satış gücü verimliliği, satış geliri, maliyetler, müşteri memnuniyeti, süreç doğruluğu ve müşteri bilgisi yoluyla yatırım getirisi sağlamak için satış gücü otomasyonu (SFA) ile entegre bir yönetim olan CRM müşteri ilişkileri yönetimine yatırım yapar. CRM ve SFA çok katmanlıdır. Başarılı bir şekilde uygulanmasının önünde bazı engel...

Purpose of the paper: The paper explores use of big data in innovation and market leadership in B2B relationships. It provides a framework to analyze the impact of big data, supported by four case studies. Methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper, supported by case studies, offering the opportunity for concept generalization. The case study...

Purpose This paper aims to review the development of thinking about the information needed by companies to create an accurate picture of how well they manage their engagement with customers, taking into account the evolution of thinking and practice in this area over the past three decades towards the idea of data-driven customer engagement. It the...

This chapter offers insights into the relationship between talent management and hidden inequalities. To achieve this, it explores the concept of talent management, and presents the significant role that diversity management, organisational culture, organisational justice and performance management play in retaining and managing talent in organisat...

Purpose This paper reviews the literature on information mismanagement and constructs a typology of misinformation that can be applied to analyse project planning and strategic planning processes to reduce the chances of failure that results from information mismanagement. This paper aims to summarize the research on information mismanagement and...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore very recent data about how large organizations are dealing with a shortage of information and communications technology (ICT) specialists, in terms of its implications for information management. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on qualitative interview-based research with 11 large E...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate information management in a smart city. It identifies the main trends in progress and how innovation in information technology is helping all those in the smart city ecosystem in terms of generating new sources of data and connecting them. It investigates how information management in the smart ci...

This article reviews some issues associated with the way in which academic research into marketing is evaluated by UK education authorities using their research excellence framework (REF), in particular the impact component of the assessment. It discusses the extent to which research by marketing academics published in leading academic journals is...

This paper investigates the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) of Greek banks' top management in the context of profound organisational changes introduced in 2012 as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis. It focuses on the impact of three key dimensions of the SDMP, namely, rationality, intuition and political behaviour, relating to fo...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the information leaders keep their organisations competitive by determining if their business model is under threat and/or needs changing and whether business model innovation is needed. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a grounded theory approach to probe an area which has been so far re...

Purpose This case study describes how one of the world’s largest public transport operations, Transport for London (TfL), transformed the real-time availability of information for its customers and staff through the open data approach, and what the results of this transformation were. The purpose of this paper is therefore to show what is required...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain how ecosystems and platforms have evolved to manage customer information and to identify the management, research and teaching implications of this evolution. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on research and industrial experience of two of the co-authors in customer relationship manage...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of analysts in providing information to support business model innovation. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on initial research by two of the co-authors on business models (Stott et al., 2016), to which is added the experience of members of the team in working in strategic a...

This article describes a case study on a project to create cooperation between international (EU) and national governments, small and large enterprises, universities and non-governmental charitable and social organizations. It explains the nature of the project and investigates the implications of the project for the discourse concerning the Triple...

Purpose This paper aims to explore the impact of the internet and related information and communications technology developments on how financial services (FS) are distributed and how customers are managed, in particular, not only how companies can differentiate between “good” and “bad” customers and manage them appropriately but also how customers...

Purpose The purpose of this research is to identify how managers can apply the results of academic research into the concept of business models for creating and evaluating possible models for their businesses. Design/methodology/approach A review of the literature is followed by two case studies, from the airline and logistics industries, followed...

The aim of this chapter is to review empirical and theoretical academic research about Private Label products (PLs) and to suggest directions for future research. The review focuses on the period of greatest scientific output (2000-2014) and consults all the international publications on marketing ranked by the Academic Journal Quality Guide. This...

This article is a personal reflection on a career that combined much practical business to business work with academic positions. The author reflects on which experiences have been most valuable and where the experiences were most closely related to what academics in different fields have written.

This article explains the need for a storytelling approach in customer insight management. It outlines a useful training methodology to help customer insight specialists improve how they explain insights to colleagues and how they can support colleagues who need to use storytelling.

The value of customer relationship management (CRM) lies in its ability to help businesses improve their understanding of their customers. CRM enhances the customer experience and builds long-term customer value. This chapter discusses that CRM has increased rapidly in popularity. It is because it is seen as a way of streamlining sales and marketin...

This chapter elaborates the use of scenarios in distribution, channel management and customer management strategies. All companies need to ensure that their products and services are accessible to their customers, managing the best and most cost-effective method by which customers can access their offers. Generally, in each market, a model of custo...

This article explores the applicability of some ideas from the world of competitive information and strategy to direct and digital marketing. It is based on the writer’s experience of working in both areas, particularly in customer insight. It first explores some of the key ideas of competitive strategy, including those derived from learning about...

This article focuses on the competitiveness of the consumer telecommunications industry. It explains how the telecommunications industry has changed and how it is merging or intersecting with other industries, such as information technology, media and financial service; how differences between products have emerged; and the effect of these differen...

Marketing is operating within a complex and rapidly evolving ecosystem that combines internal and external resources. This article considers the elements that are in play and how they are affecting the way in which marketers themselves need to evolve.

A dual market exists for training — digital marketers who need to grasp the full breadth of both online and offline activity and conventional marketers who need to skill-up for the digital realm. This article considers the differing needs of these groups and how well existing training resources are meeting them.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explain how the management of the two areas business intelligence (BI) and customer insight (CI) needs to be brought together to support a company's interactive marketing. Design/methodology/approach – The article is based on the author's work in consultancy and in assessing client company's customer man...

This piece explores how academic writers can make their work more relevant to practitioners, and what practitioners can do to help them in this.

This article explains how social media channels enable brands and companies to engage with consumers. It builds on the authors' work on customer management strategies, showing how social media can be used throughout the customer management cycle. The authors suggest that for social media to be used effectively in support of the above strategies, co...

This article reflects on the author's career in database marketing and customer relationship management, explaining what took him into this line of work over 30 years ago and identifying the main changes in client requirements that he has observed.

This article draws upon the research and consulting carried out by the authors over the past two decades, to produce a straightforward categorisation of the main customer strategies available to companies, and suggests a simple approach to prioritising them.

This article focuses on the trade-off between efficiency and customer experience management in the financial services sector. It is based on the author's extensive work with financial services companies and review of the literature. Its main conclusions are that many financial services suppliers are under pressure to improve efficiency and margin,...

This article examines the tension between efficiency and customer experience management in retailing. It concludes that one way forward is to give customers the tools to manage their own experience. To put it another way, in these industries, it is up to the customer to manage their own experience. In some industries, such as complex financial serv...

This article explores the rapidly rising incidence of corruption and fraud in universities, whether by students or staff. It asks whether companies are prepared for the extent to which their future customers or employees may have been socialised into unethical patterns of behaviour, and outlines an agenda for students to enable them to identify whe...

The issue of market delineation may seem an old fashioned topic to many industrial economists. The grand theoretical debates on this topic petered out in the eady 1970's, and in recent years, the associated concept of market concentration has been used far less self-confidently than heretofore as a central explanation for firm profitability.

Consultants working on commercial projects often fail to take account of the deep and broad academic literature on the topic on which they are working. Because of his position as a hybrid academic and consultant, the author is obliged to keep closely in touch with the different literatures for the areas in which he teaches - broadly marketing, cust...

The purpose of this article is to explore customer retention strategies and tactics implemented by firms in recession. Our investigations show just how big a challenge many organizations face in their ability to manage customer retention effectively. While leading organizations have embedded real-time customer life cycle management, developed accur...

The next decade is widely forecast to be a decade when a new technology and a new approach to power distribution takes hold globally. This is the ‘smart grid’ – otherwise known as the intelligent grid system – which is intended to turn on its head traditional centralised models of providing energy to consumers. The approach is expected to empower a...

This article illustrates a Grounded Theory-based approach towards the discovery of the CRM Behaviour Theory. The CRM Behaviour Theory represents seven inter-related perspectives of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) relating to managing corporate customer relationships in service industries such as telecommunications. To gain a fresh perspectiv...

This article examines the potential effect on CRM of smart metering and smart networks in utilities. It examines the kind of interactions that will take place between suppliers and customers, and the likely change in the competitive situation. It concludes that utilities are on the verge of a data and customer management revolution of the kind that...

This article explores the relationship between customer experiences with call centres and company profitability. Empirical research using data from the ERIC Programme™ of Harding & Yorke and financial data from the AMADEUS database identifies that there is a strong relationship between certain dimensions of the customer experience and profitability...

The importance of staying close to the customer in `interesting times' has increased. Recent evidence shows not only the extent of use of the Internet and its perceived importance, but also the extent of use of Web 2.0. Comparison sites or aggregators have flourished. The effect of their arrival and of the practices of the most advanced web busines...

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of information technology (IT) project management and governance. Interviews were carried out with 10 senior managers in different organisations who had been involved in major IT projects. It follows on from a study carried out by Stone, Ekinci and Foss concerning success and failure in custome...

Business-to-business (B2B) companies invest in customer relationship management (CRM), integrated with sales force automation (SFA) to achieve a return on investment, through improved sales force productivity, sales revenue, costs, customer satisfaction, process accuracy and customer knowledge. However, the devil is in the detail. CRM and SFA are m...

In this paper, we review the results of a recent pilot study of the extent to which public sector organisations (PSOs) are focused on understanding and managing stakeholders, citizens or customers. Our conclusion is that while at the tactical level there has been some progress, there is still a long way to go when it comes to focusing PSOs on this...

Although customer relationship management (CRM) has been one of the fastest growing businesses of the new millennium, critics point to the high failure rate of the CRM projects as evidenced by commercial market studies. The purpose of the study is to investigate success and failures of CRM system implementations. We found that the scope, size, comp...

Purpose – There has been an increasing application of remote technology to customer service. This research, from business-to-business financial services, seeks to gain insight and understanding into how the supplier/customer relationship and account management are impacted. Design/methodology/approach – Taking a realism approach, the qualitative re...

The purpose of this study is to investigate users' perception of Salespoint.com, which is a web-based CRM software application developed by Marketpoint, UK. An online survey was administered to 206 users from six international companies. The findings of the study suggest that usefulness of marketing database search, ease of navigation and usefulnes...

This paper investigates some aspects of customer retention, in particular the role of customer data and contact centres. It investigates the reasons for problems in managing customer retention, from definition and strategy to operational issues. It describes some recent qualitative research carried out by the authors and shows how different compani...

This paper is based on anonymous research carried out in summer 2005 with eight well-known companies. Here, the authors present the results and then suggest some conclusions based on this research and other work they have done to help companies find and then manage customer relationship management (CRM) specialists.Journal of Database Marketing & C...

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been in use for about ten years. After the post-2001 economic downturn, CRM attracted less interest in many organisations, as many benefits did not materialise. Cost-cutting strategies prevailed, despite many firms facing problems of decreasing loyalty and declining shares-of-wallet in an increasingly comp...

This paper describes a study carried out by the IBM Institute for Business Value focusing on how companies use segmentation. It shows that although segmentation is widely used, there are significant opportunities for companies to improve their approach to segmentation, in particular by adding the time dimension and by expanding the use of segmentat...

The forces of deregulation and technological development have created a highly competitive environment in financial services. Despite the quest for business-to-business service efficiency, most financial services companies know that they must not lose sight of the importance of relationship quality. As a result, there is growing interest in key acc...

The authors were commissioned to carry out a study of the way in which the experience of automotive insurance companies of claiming after an accident affected their attitude to companies and their subsequent loyalty. A consumer omnibus study was used to identify relevant market segments and to provide an estimate for the overall number of claims. T...