Emerging Marketing.

Thanks to microchips, companies in developed markets routinely collect and store huge volumes of information about their customers. Thanks to continuous-relationship-marketing (CRM) tools, this valuable resource doesn't lie inert but is instead used to fashion sample customer segments that can be used to test new offers. The winning ones are then turned into full-scale marketing campaigns. It seems unlikely that CRM would work this well in emerging markets, where accurate customer data, advanced IT systems, …

…at first. What brought the managers around was seeing that CRM campaigns can boost the performance of branches. When a pilot campaign promoting on-line banking, for example, was rolled out, the CRM team showed branch managers how it encouraged customers to conduct more transactions than they had previously conducted and to increase their account balances. Once the branch managers realized how the campaign could benefit them, they became champions of CRM throughout the entire organization.