CRM as a term has been hijacked to infer that mass contact via mail was about building relationships, rather than just seeking a sub-1% response rate for upsell and cross-sell. For reasons of scale, the strategic focus often slipped from the top 20% of consumers that drive the majority of value and the next 30% who will grow your business. Implementation of CRM became a mass-marketing machine that often lacked both marketing intelligence and any focus on the specific needs of the consumer. At worse, CRM was an acronym to hide junk mail behaviours and at best, the software that provided data to call centers and sales forces.

Then we adopted the Internet. We are now all active consumers.

We search, self-serve, contact and manage our consumption. The browser is the starting point for many transactions, even our supermarket shopping. And the retail shopping we do on the high street is increasingly influenced by what we find online. The mail pack pumped out in the millions and pushed through your letterbox, has been replaced. We now look to the opinions of friends, recommendations of machines and the influence of subject experts. We engage brands, subscribe to newsletters and customize our social feeds. We do all this to be better informed and make more personalized product choices.

What does this mean for brands?

The starting point is always the product and your strategic must-win battles. The vast majority of the effort for all companies should be on the product: demonstrable value, quality and innovation. Then you can start building relationships. Whom do we focus on to evolve our products and provide the highest levels of service? Whom do we need to work hardest with to build an advantage over the competition? And finally, who would buy if we made it really easy for them to understand and access our products? Now get permission, start building participation and work at retaining the right value consumers.

From a consumer point of view, in the Internet age, CRM starts with engaging with original content that brings alive a product.

Active attention is gained from a continual feed of ideas and an inside-view of product innovation. Content that is simple for search engines to rank and for social communities to share. This forms the heart of getting permission: consumers engage and provide their permission for ongoing contact, either through a purchase or a subscription. And increasingly this content needs to be ‘semantic’. That is, a top-layer consumers see or read and a bottom layer that is read and contextualized by the machines. That means CRM is now founded on producing content and filtering that best influences product research and consideration. Content is king. Curation reigns supreme.

Secondly, personalization has become an increasingly important aspect of CRM.

The ability to personalize the content consumers wants to see. Technology intelligently provides relevant suggestions, based on consumer context and past behaviours. This goes beyond micro-segmentation of newsletters and product recommendations on a webpage. Effective CRM now has to reach into personalization of the product. Assessing the ethnographics of your most-value consumers enables companies to better understand motivations, behaviours and opinions – this also provides a passionate and vocal group from beta testing and pre-launching. Though with advances in technology, personalization can provide high-value consumers the opportunity to directly customize aspects of the product – a functionality that can be rolled across a whole consumer group depending on need for exclusivity and ability to build additional value.

And finally, the rise of Social CRM.

This is not so much a change in CRM as the utilization of social networks to provide a voice for the brand and opportunity for direct contact with consumers. On a simple level, social networks enable brands to build a personality, relevance of their products and expand perception of the brand beyond its core service – for companies this helps the shift from being seen as a functional product or more of a lifestyle service. Listening to consumers to understand their needs and direct consumer service contact provides additional opportunities to address problems and leverage advocacy. However, building relationships directly on social networks involves understanding that brands can no longer dictate the dialogue they can only influence it.

Adrian Jarvis is a Director, Strategy at Organic