Holistic Marketing Management, Volume 4, Issue 3, Year 2014

Editorial Board of “Holistic Marketing Management” (A refereed journal published four times annually by the School of Management-Marketing of the Romanian-American University) Editor-in-Chief Theodor Valentin PURCĂREA Editorial Board

Bernd HALLIER

John SAEE

John L. STANTON

Léon F. WEGNEZ

William PERTTULA Levent ALTINAY Dana ZADRAZILOVA Riccardo BELTRAMO Sinisa ZARIC Gabriela SABĂU Hélène NIKOLOPOULOU Vasa LÁSZLÓ Peter STARCHON John MURRAY Kamil PÍCHA Irena JINDRICHOVSKA Norbert HAYDAM

Holistic Marketing Management

Managing Director EuroHandels Institute Retail, Germany; President of EuCVoT; President of European Retail Academy; Member of the Astana Economic Scientists Club; Chairman of the Advisory Board of EuroShop; Chairman of the Board of the Orgainvent; Trustee of EHI Retail Institute at GLOBALG.A.P. Association of Management and International Association of Management, USA; Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, the Faculty of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne University of Technology; Member of France’s National Academy of Scientific Research (CNRS) Professor of Food Marketing, Erivan K. Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph’s University Philadelphia, USA; Director, Institute of Food Products Marketing, Editor, Journal of Food Products Marketing Secretary General, International Association of the Distributive Trade, AIDA Brussels; Member of France’s Academy of Commercial Sciences; Doctor Honoris Causa of NUPSPA (SNSPA) Bucharest Internet Marketing Professor, College of Business, San Francisco State University, USA Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Research Area Leader, Oxford School of Hospitality Management, Faculty of Business, Oxford Brookes University, UK Dean of Faculty of International Economic Relations, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic University of Turin, Italy University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia Memorial University, Grenfell Campus, Corner Brook, Canada University of Lille 3, France Szent Istvan University, Hungary Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia Faculty of Business, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Faculty of Economics,University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice Deputy Head of Department of Business Economics, University of Economics and Management, Prague, Czech Republic Faculty of Business, Marketing Department, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa 1

Constantin ROŞCA Hans ZWAGA Roxana CODITA Dumitru MIRON Valeriu IOAN-FRANC Iacob CĂTOIU Virgil BALAURE Gheorghe ORZAN Luigi DUMITRESCU Marius D. POP Petru FILIP Ion VOICU SUCALA Virgil POPA Alexandru NEDELEA Olguța Anca ORZAN Ana-Maria PREDA Ileana PONORAN Ovidiu FOLCUȚ Doinița CIOCÎRLAN Marius Dan DALOTĂ Mihai PAPUC Gheorghe ILIESCU Alexandru IONESCU Olga POTECEA Oana PREDA Nicoleta DUMITRU Monica Paula RAȚIU Costel NEGRICEA

President of Romanian Scientific Society of Management - SSMAR Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences, Finland Technische Universität München, TUM School of Management Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest National Institute for Economic Research, Romanian Academy; Romanian Marketing Association; Romanian Distribution Committee Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca Dimitrie Cantemir University, Bucharest Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Management and Economic Engineering Department; University of Glasgow, UK, College of Social Sciences, School of Social & Political Sciences; Managing Editor, Review of Management and Economic Engineering Valahia University of Târgovişte Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy Bucharest Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University Romanian-American University

Associate Editors Diana SOCA Irina PURCĂREA Dan SMEDESCU Art Designer Director Alexandru BEJAN

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“Holistic Marketing Management” (A refereed journal published four times annually by the School of Management-Marketing of the Romanian-American University) Volume 4, Issue 3, Year 2014

Contents

Theodor Valentin PURCĂREA - Editorial: The launching ceremony of AFER’s Volume “Pages from the Romanian Economic Higher Education History, 1843-2013” at the Romanian-American University…………………………………………………………... 4 Theodor Valentin PURCĂREA - Marketing’s Continuous Rise and Shine…………………... 6

Costel Iliuță NEGRICEA - Chief Marketing Officer and the Challenge of Digital Maturity…28 Ioan Matei PURCĂREA

Diana SOCA - CRM – The New Business Strategy in the Digital Age……………………… 37

Ioan Matei PURCĂREA - An Interview with Matthew R. Lee, Psychology Professor, James Madison University……………………………………………...... 45

Theodor Valentin PURCĂREA - The latest issue of our partner journal, „Marketing Science and Inspirations”, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia…………………………………………………… 48

The responsibility for the contents of the scientific and the authenticity of the published materials and opinions expressed rests with the author.

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Editorial: The launching ceremony of AFER’s Volume “Pages from the Romanian Economic Higher Education History, 1843-2013” at the Romanian-American University The Romanian-American University’s Senate Hall hosted on Thursday, 12th of June 2014, the launching ceremony of AFER’s Volume “Pages from the Romanian Economic Higher Education History, 1843-2013”. The launching ceremony was officially opened by Professor Ovidiu Folcut (who made the welcome speech in a warmly manner, not forgetting to mention the significant contribution of the Promoter and Founder of AFER, Professor Ion Gh. Roşca), Rector of the Romanian-American University (RAU) - and coordinator of the Chapters 19-27 of the launched Volume - who gave the floor to Professor Ioan Talpos, President of the prestigious Association of Faculties of Economics in Romania (AFER), who thanked again to all those who have joined this attempt at providing an homage to the past, at respectfully honoring the present and at confidently looking forward to the future, and also underlining the traditional significant involvement of the Romanian-American University.

Professor Ovidiu Folcut, Rector of the Romanian-American University and coordinator of the Chapters 19-27 of the launched Volume

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Professor Ioan Talpos gave the floor further to: Theodor Purcarea, Professor at the Romanian-American University, and Editorial Advisor of the launched Volume (who also remembered that RAU Founding Rector Professor Ion Smedescu often mentioned Father Staniloaie speaking of the necessity of the conscious sense of the ordinance, of the beauty, in order to perform a task the right way, in joyful communion); Professor Constantin Floricel; Professor Ion Bulborea; Professor Constantin Rosca, Executive Director of AFER, and Editor of the launched Volume (whose “executive” contribution was highlighted by Professors Ioan Talpos and Theodor Purcarea); Ana-Maria Preda, Professor at the Romanian-American University.

Dean Alexandru Ionescu, RAU School of Management-Marketing The ceremony was attended by other RAU representatives (such as Dean Alexandru Ionescu, School of Management-Marketing) and AFER academic community representatives (such as: Marioara Avram, University of Craiova; Mihaela Birsan, University “Stefan cel Mare” Suceava; Cristian Marian Barbu and Aurel Diaconu, Artifex University), and the last but not the least RAU students, and even former students such as George Cosmin Tanase, a 2007 RAU Management-Marketing School Valedictorian, who is working at American Express (always recognized as a great place to work).

Theodor Valentin Purcărea Editor - in - Chief Holistic Marketing Management

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MARKETING’ S CONTINUOUS RISE AND SHINE Theodor Valentin PURCAREA Abstract The face of the marketing function is struggling to keep pace with major changes, by assuming its strategic and systemic leading role. Being considered the corporate equivalent of a central nervous system, an art and also a management science calling for the implementation of rigorous processes and metrics, marketing is challenged to be more and more creative and accountable, more real-time offering personalized, content delivered across channels, and to engage CEOs and the top leadership to valorize the ability of the marketing function to help drive organizational change, focusing on what is important to customers, consumers and users, within the rise of social media, big-data analytics, and smart mobile devices, differentiating social media marketing from social business.

There is no doubt about the importance of reinforcing and embedding ROI thinking in the daily marketing approach, the struggling of marketing managers for new rules and measurements to use in the new world of measurable performance, while the purpose of measuring must extend beyond just collecting metrics, focusing on demonstrating how marketing is creating and capturing customer value, taking into account both, the opportunity to measure customer value, and the power that has shifted from sellers to buyers. Marketers need to know what exactly they should measure and if their analytics are actionable, balancing their inbound and outbound marketing, mastering the latest technology, assimilating vast quantities of data, engaging and delighting their more connected and empowered than ever before customers, and delivering products and services that surpass their expectations, combining technology and teamwork and using technology and teamwork to listen accordingly, creating a vision for an exceptional customer experience and connecting everyone in the organization to the delivery of that seamless experience, stimulating a more collaborative working relationship between CMOs and CIOs, and a vision to anticipate new digital channels, and considering digital marketing makeover as the number one transformational project. Marketers also need a good understanding of the fact that the content is the fuel for company lead generation and nurturing programs, driving leads through the marketing funnel to become customers, and in order to implement buyer journey marketing from a lead generation perspective there are crucial guidelines for organizations. There is also a real need for marketers of not relying too heavily on analytics, but on the so-called “both-brain” approach, by making the right balance between creativity and analytics, and also to constantly reevaluate the marketing strategies, by acting with speed and agility in addressing key customer needs and expectations. Marketing has to take responsibility, and confirm that innovation is its best friend, not forgetting that the integration of looking both inward and outward is the most powerful formula for creating long-term, high-impact Marketing Thinking change.

Key words: Marketing function; Creative, Accountable, and Real-Time Marketing; Marketing ROI Thinking; Balanced Inbound and Outbound marketing; Customer-Centricity; Lean Content Marketing; Buyer’s Journey; “Both-Brain” Approach JEL Classification: M31, M14, M15, D83, D03

Major changes that promised in the sixties, the 20th century, to transform future marketing efforts, and marketing in the first decade of the 21st century Forty-eight years ago, (Louth, 1966 ) John D. Louth (a principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office and specialized in problems of organization, marketing, and sales management) attracted our attention that the face of the marketing function will have to keep pace with six Holistic Marketing Management

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major changes that promised to transform future marketing efforts: the dominance of the customer; the spread of marketing research; the rise of the computer; expanded use of test marketing (more controlled experimentation to narrow the odds of an error in making marketing changes); metamorphosis of field selling (tomorrow’s salespeople will be “sophisticated marketers”: planning oriented, service oriented, and technically skilled); global market planning (but, according to Louth, without unduly restricting initiative and responsibility within each national segment). On July 23, 2014 (Verdino, 2014), Greg Verdino (a leading digital strategist and popular keynote speaker who helps leaders build thriving 21st century organizations – according to gregverdino.com/), went beyond simply praising John D. Louth („for his prescience, although his ability to foresee a decades-long evolution of the marketing function is indeed impressive”), highlighting „the importance of taking the long view — in marketing and in business in general.” Verdino listed the six trends underlined by Louth, followed by his modernday take on each theme, concluding, after some actual references, including a reference to his article „ Strategy is change” (Verdino, 2013), that: „ The smart business leader might make serious work of understanding how the things happening right now and the things that may happen 40 years from now are merely two points on a continuum of constant change.”

This opinion expressed by Verdino reminded me of an article published in McKinsey Quarterly, March 2014, by Nate Boaz (a principal in McKinsey’s Atlanta office) and Erica Ariel Fox (a founding partner at Mobius Executive Leadership, a lecturer in negotiation at Harvard Law School, and a senior adviser to McKinsey Leadership Development; Fox is the author of “Winning from Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change,” HarperBusiness, 2013).(Boaz & Fox, 2014) According to the authors, organizations don’t change - people do, anyone who pulls the organization in new directions must look inward as well as outward, organizational change being inseparable from individual change, because: despite the stated change goals, people on the ground tend to behave as they did before; individuals learn to align what they intend with what they actually say and do to influence others (“closing your performance gap”, according to the mentioned book). The article concluded: “Learning to lead yourself requires you to question some core assumptions too, about yourself and the way things work… This integration of looking both inward and outward is the most powerful formula we know for creating long-term, high-impact organizational change.”

It is well known that marketing’s object of study is a result of the economists’ research (from the end of the 19th century) referring to the nature of distribution process.(Purcarea & Ratiu) Being in Bucharest for the first time, in May 2005, Philip Kotler highlighted the imperative of “the development of better abilities in innovation, differentiation, branding and service, in a word marketing”, recommending the development of a stronger marketing: holistic, strategic, technological, financially oriented. The “father of marketing” emphasized, among other things, the need to resort to a lateral marketing, conceiving new product and service ideas. In Kotler’s opinion, marketing is the art of brand building. He also showed that one of the shortest definitions of marketing is the profitable fulfillment of needs. The commercial space is no longer what it was, more and more marketing people acknowledge the need to have a more complete, Holistic Marketing Management

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cohesive approach which goes beyond traditional applications of the marketing concept. An approach that attempts to acknowledge and reconcile the sphere and complexity of marketing activities is represented by holistic marketing (development, design and implementation of programs, processes and marketing activities which acknowledge content and interdependencies) whose components are: relational marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing and marketing of social responsibilities. Marketing management is - according to the same acknowledged opinion - the art and science of choosing target markets and winning, preserving and increasing the client base by creating, delivering and communicating a superior value to the client. He - the client - has, in many cases, undefined preferences, which are ambiguous or even conflicting. On the other hand, Kotler’s mentor - Peter Drucker - says that the purpose of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service is perfectly suited to him and sells by itself. But customers respond differently to the company’s image and the company’s brand; the identity - the way in which a company identifies itself, self-positions itself or positions its products - and the image - the way in which the public perceives the company or its products/services – require a distinction.

Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller (Kotler & Keller, 2005) emphasized, in 2005, the need to build a creative marketing organization, the capacity for strategic innovation and imagination coming from the assembly of instruments, processes, abilities and measures which will allow the company to generate more and better ideas than their competition. And this requires also assuming social responsibility because the business success and the client’s continuous satisfaction are closely related to the implementation of high leadership standards of a business and marketing. The key to branding - emphasized Kotler and Keller - is the customers’ perception of the differences between the brands belonging to a category of products.

A branding strategy identifies which elements of a brand (name, term, sign, symbol, design, a combination of the previous) the company chooses to apply to the different products it sells. In order to serve multiple market segments, often, multiple brands are required (the basic principle in designing a brand portfolio is the maximization of market coverage, so that no potential customer is ignored).

In the same year, 2005, Vincent Grimaldi (Grimaldi, 2005) argued that resistance to change – which is ingrained in human nature – makes good marketing difficult in practice, adding that marketing must be given a role that is both strategic and systemic (in order to maintain company’s competitiveness), managing to live in a symbiosis with the increasingly demanding customers and the changing environment, going beyond marketing’s support role and penetrating most aspects of the organization. According to Grimaldi, marketing is the corporate equivalent of a central nervous system, being an art and also a management science calling for the implementation of rigorous processes and metrics, and it should be both creative and accountable. Grimaldi insisted further that: the Baldridge criteria for performance excellence puts marketing in a leading role, together with leadership and strategic planning; because the customer is at the core of the problem, great strategies are developed around him; the corporate

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strategy ends up being totally customer-driven ensuring that every step of the process is developed with a market quick feedback and… obtaining the customers’ ”Wow”.

A year before, in 2004, Nirmalya Kumar (Kumar, 2004) drew the attention to the fact that: “management has forgotten, or never realized, the ability of the marketing function to help drive organizational change” (Nirmalya Kumar - Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, May 5, 2004). To improve the company’s value, marketers must engage CEOs and the top leadership in meeting the two marketplace challenges that all companies face (enhancing customer loyalty and reducing downward pressure on prices), in looking for growth-related initiatives (like expanding to new and growing channels of distribution, selling solutions instead of products, and pursuing radical rather than incremental innovation), and in finding which aspects of marketing are really scale-sensitive versus those elements where local adaptation truly increases value for customers.

In the “next-generation marketing”, customer experience is going behind the lines, “audience is king” so, let’s “learn more about the customers and how they think”. First of all, a company has to see if it is possible to integrate this customer orientation and how can this be made possible. According to the opinion expressed in 2006 by the well-known Professor Don E. Shultz (Schulz, 2006), the first thing is to stop thinking about products (ensuring the transition from product to service) and start thinking about customers as income flows, then think about all of the ways customers touch you, or you touch them. This customer alignment and integration presumes having good customer data and using it efficiently, customers always appreciating the manner in which the company and its partners deal with dissatisfaction, inefficiency and opportunity. The “machinery” made up of the employees’ engagement and the clients’ engagement can significantly influence the company’s performance, the difficulty consisting in the fact that the recognition of the customer engagement’s need and the actual measurement of the real engagement are two different things (the real engagement being the consequence of the marketing/communication programme which produces an increased level of brand perception as meeting and overwhelming customer expectations/“brand equity”, while customer expectations are generally based on emotions).

Professor Shultz considered that: marketers’ training must be focused on what is important to customers, not to the company (because, for example, in the case of the FMCG, the manufacturer has to start thinking about how to become a better partner for the retailers in terms of capturing, sharing and using information and data); marketing is what the organization does, the marketing department ought to be the one that is aligning the organization, taking into account that there are lots of tools, tactics, techniques that can be outsourced - including strategy - rather than having those done by employees. Within this framework, Shultz’s company has proposed a “media consumption model”, because every developed approach is based on distributing messages through the media and what is measured is distribution: every consumer today is creating his or her own internal information network, having an internal model for how he evaluates information sources and how he solves his problems (internal networks created for themselves). Consumers have created the ability to not only give advice, but also to get advice Holistic Marketing Management

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from multiple sources and, that is why marketers need to look at how customers and consumers and users communicate with each other, by going back to the consumer-created media.

And coming back to a pragmatic question: how do we get customer insight? The future’s marketing organization is going to have employees who can deal with both push and pull forms of marketing, by recognizing that today’s real challenge is to be very responsive, and to give feedback (the responses generated by the marketing come back to customer service, sales, technical support), so that the marketing people have relevance and view of what the responses are. Brand experiences - according to the same Don E. Shultz - are the responsibility of part-time marketers - employees, retailers, customer service people who are not trained as marketing people but they are doing most of the marketing for the organization, being on the ground responding to people – and not of marketers. That is why one of the challenges is to get budget starting by thinking about customers as flows of income, aggregating those customers up and, building a financial calculation so that it is an investment and a return (beyond the actual marketing department as a cost center that can’t measure, financially, the returns the marketing organization is generating).

Just remember that on April 2006, the well-known Al Ries (Ries, 2006) wrote that marketing study starts with psychology study, and if psychology is the systematic study of human behaviour, then marketing is the systematic study of human behaviour on the market. In order to discover how the company can better satisfy customers’ needs, marketing people have to work together with the company’s clients, offering assistance and trying to understand their preferences. That is why Kotler considers “participation marketing” as a more appropriate concept, compared to “permission marketing”.

The next year, 2007, Jonah Bloom (Bloom, 2007) showed that “we now live in a culture of instantly disseminated opinion”, everything in the public domain being instantly spread and dissected and in such a world marketers have to accept that they won't please all the people all the time: consumers are in control and messages are reinterpreted and criticized”.

As we all know, in our world of continuous change, where the boundary between the organizations becomes even more complex, reacting (besides being proactive) to the marketplace’s challenges means to build architecture that will flexibly integrate corporate information. And as this world of continuous change is a “marketing world” governed more by perceptions, marketers need: an adequate marketing roadmap to arrive at the best positioning on the targeted market, knowing how customers perceive them, having the ability of being perceived as they really are, trying to offer their customers expertise and insights because they really need to have someone buy, so they must help their customers to decide how to buy; to be value driven (so as to understand what customers expect), implementing the knowledge obtained, overcoming the barriers to communications, translating each value proposition into the customer’s language, thinking of expertise as an abundant resource and time to respond as a scarce one, enabling the future; to renew organizational knowledge continuously - developing a knowledge culture – and within this framework to improve communication between internal suppliers and customers, by supporting a cross-functional process and adopting an interactive Holistic Marketing Management

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value perspective, according to a relationship value management, working in a way that enables the relationship marketing process to deliver on key stakeholder expectation.

As we underlined in 2008, there was a continuous debate within the academic marketing community about the so-called “critical marketing” and providing critical understanding: of the organization and impact of marketing operations; of the factors that are shaping marketing activities; of marketing professions and morality on the marketplace; of the mechanisms used by marketers for creating and supporting customer values; of consumer culture and the impact of brands; of the development and implementation of marketing strategies and programs; of the impacts of the marketing concepts’ and techniques’ application in a competitive environment; of marketing’s interpretation within the framework of the relationship marketing; of redefining markets and marketing.

Marketers or not, we are all consumers and cannot escape the market, but we are not passive recipients of what marketers do, that is why – as the well-known Professor Michael Saren sustained in 2007 (Saren, 2007) – marketers must look at the marketing phenomenon as consumers experience it, as active participants in it, by achieving a broader perspective on marketing. And, the key to achieving such a new perspective is building of customer relationships, by understanding that customer relationships are the most important company’s asset needing to be managed. This “interaction approach” (Industrial Marketing and PurchasingIMP), whose essential aim is to create value for both parties, is based on the idea that this process of interactivity takes place between active buyers and sellers that are individually significant to each other. According to Professor Saren: the “critical marketing” extends its domain and gives a specific example to demonstrate the necessity that the academic discipline of marketing must encompass the wide range of activities and effects that it manifests in practice today; the problematic issue of relevance in marketing, considering the fact that in management and marketing relevance itself has often been defined in a restricted manner to imply usefulness as measured by a sub-group of either practitioners or self-selected intermediaries.

Next year, 2008, there were interesting opinions expressed by David Armano who has insisted on the followings: there is a problem with marketing, because many times it doesn’t allow marketers to gain an intimate understanding of human behavior, (Armano, 2008) and we have to take into account that “the real action happens in the comments” (Armano, 2008); “unconventional times call for unconventional tactics” (speaking on his personal blog experience as one of the most effective manifestations of “marketing”) (Armano, 2008) and we have to consider the so-called “marketing spiral” (introduced during his conversation with Gary Cohen and Jay Ehret - Armano, 2008): awareness - interaction, engagement, participation, conversation, affinity - community.

Allow us to remember that in 2006 we noticed (Theodor Purcarea, REBE-FA06-A7.pdf) that the “machinery” made up of the engagement of the enterprise worker and the engagement of his clients can significantly influence the performance of the company, the “engagement” (Passikoff, 2006) having already entered the list of traditional marketing activities and having already proved an increase in demand for evaluations connected to Return on Investment (ROI).

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The latter in the context in which engagement – defined as the result of marketing activities and advertising which substantially increase the power of the brand in the eyes of the client (if it has been measured adequately in can really forecast sales and profitability) – is used more and more to allocate marketing budgets. Three years after, in 2009, we underlined (Theodor Purcarea, REBE-SU09-A4.pdf) the importance of a long term relationship between marketers and customers on the road to “the next society” (a road dotted with many signs / phrases: “new society”, “new reality”, “new economy”, “the new organization”...

It is also worth to remember in this framework that in in the same year, 2009, in a White Paper entitled „The Future of Marketing”, published by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (Evmorfia Argyriou, Peter Leeflang, John Saunders, Peter Verhoeff), it was argued that marketers have a key role to play in better business performance, but marketing can be hampered by short-term thinking by the business and a lack of accountability, creativity and courage on the part of marketers themselves… By having respect for the marketing department activities, recognizing the strategic importance for marketing (there is a well-known agreement on marketing’ s important contribution to strategy, the exceptional importance of branding, and the need for businesses to be customer centered), top management can win by backing marketing (in both B2B and B2C markets, marketing being more developed in its B2C birthplace) which has the unique ability to add value in the market place and constitutes the facilitator helping the whole organization to survive and thrive by serving customers (customer proximity being a marketing strength), conveying customer needs across the company and converting best marketers knowledge into product ideas, considering the ingredients of high corporate returns: product quality, innovation and strong brands. As marketing accountability is considered being tough intellectually and spiritually, this involves, in the opinion of the mentioned authors, the followings: a) projecting and living with financial outcomes of plans and strategies; b) developing several skills (forecasting outcomes; dynamic forecasting showing the impact of marketing activities on sales: profits and return on investment); c) having courage (this being bundled with analytical skills that are central to market accountability), the courage being considered the greatest of the highlighted trifecta (accountability, creativity and courage); d) being creative (engaging not only the left hemisphere of the brain for the sequential and analytical processes necessary for accountability, but also engaging the holistic and intuitive strengths of the right hemisphere that help creative marketing).

A year later, during the spring of 2010, Tim Parker (Parker, 2010) began to underline the importance of “the new rules of thought leadership marketing” (<< the customer has become the hunter, the marketer the hunted; an author's admirers now do the promoting; influencers have become critical marketing targets; online columns are potential new channels etc. >>), arguing that: marketers can’t control the new channels (influencers and quality online publications, viewed by readers as more credible); buyers are moving from biased to unbiased channels, the major cost in working the unbiased channels being the time. It has been observed that the new marketing reality implies a growing engagement in accepting the creative thinking challenge, progressing through knowledge and understanding towards mutual confidence, converting Holistic Marketing Management

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emotions into agreements and the relation based on these agreements into a loyal and emotionally connected one, for a certain period of time.

Next year (July 2011), in the prestigious McKinsey Quarterly (Marketing & Sales Practice), Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill emphasized that „We’re all marketers now”, (French, LaBerge & Magill, 2011) challenged to redefine the traditional marketing organization, while intensively collaborating to adapt the organizations to the way customers now behave, marketing being the company (and the company being the marketing vehicle) in the era of engagement, but not any kind of marketing, but an accountable one. In other words, a thorough understanding of the difference between being responsible (in a general sense; you can delegate it) for something and being held accountable (more measurable; you can’t delegate it to anyone) if it goes wrong, McKinsey representatives are pledging for the need for the marketing organization to become the customer-engagement engine (a customer engagement going beyond pure communication to include the product or service experience itself), while considering all related interactions with customers that make up the customer experience (challenged in turn by the multiplication of the customers renewed touch points used to interact with companies) within the reality that the buying process has become collaborative, and must ensure critical touch points that drive engagement. According to Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill, a new kind of marketing organization must evolve along four critical dimensions: distribute more activities; more councils and partnerships; elevate the role of customer insights; more data rich and analytically intense. There is a real pressure of quickly responding to the signs of customers’ changing needs, focusing on problem-solving and strategic-marketing skills, stimulating crossfunctional collaboration and a clear delineation of roles, entering into creative arrangements with outside parties, and raising the organizational barrier to engagement and avoiding the risk of being overtaken by competitors.

Avoiding being guilty of marketing deadly sins, and measuring marketing, among a company’ top priorities. Real-time marketing and the balance between inbound marketing and outbound marketing In the first quarter of 2013, Ben Straley (Straley, 2013), VP of social technologies at Rio SEO and lead instructor of interactive marketing at University of Washington’s Continuing Education Program, attracted our attention, in the well-known “Forbes”, to the paradox revealed by the difficulty of reaching real-time information about the target audiences and customers of marketing organizations and engaging them in despite of the rise of social media, big-data analytics, and smart mobile devices. Within this context, he recommended six “must-dos”: strive to master all digital media; lead the charge on attribution; re-think and then re-invent lifetime value; think and act like a publisher; get your arms around your audience data; think “serendipity,” not “stalking.”

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On the other hand, we saw that in the opinion of Cory Treffiletti (Treffiletti, 2013), SVP of Marketing, BlueKay, the same year, 2013, was considered as being critical junction for ROI, the 2013 channels talking to each other: search, video, social, display, and mobile. Within the same framework, other opinions showed that: customer profiles become the DNA for real-time customer engagement (Joe Cordo, CMO Extraprise), driven by the rapid shift to cloud-based services and solutions buyer behavior has shifted (Michael Ni, CMO/SVP of Marketing and Products, Avangate), marketers begin to make serious strides in using listening data, check-ins, photos, and other online behaviors to figure out social signals, including purchasing intent (Michael Della Penna, Senior Vice President of Emerging Channels, Responsys), the older half of Gen C will understand the repercussions of the over-sharing they engaged in as teens (Richard Pasewark, CEO, Visible Technologies), marketers understanding customer needs and preferences on mobile will be successful in tapping the potential of this channel (Michael Della Penna, Senior Vice President of Emerging Channels, Responsys).

In the same period of time Rob Carpenter (Carpenter, 2013) demonstrated that “today’s belle of the ball” is the “real-time marketing” (“the practice of brands engaging their audience via content, advertising, and product placement that is relevant to a specific current event or cultural happening”), which sprung up in marketing nomenclature at the beginning of 2005, before “social media marketing” (the first major channel for brands to monitor and engage in real-time conversations), which was starting to be used heavily in 2006. Carpenter made reference to the study released in July 2013 by Neolane (Neolane, 2013) and the Direct Marketing Association (235 North American marketers): the majority of the participants (43%) think of real-time marketing as “dynamic, personalized content delivered across channels”; 64% of participants believe real-time marketing revolves around some kind of dynamic personalization; only 23% believe real-time marketing is about making quick responses to mainstream events or injecting your business in social media conversations; only 49% of the participants believe providing real-time marketing within social media channels is highly important; while 69% believe that providing dynamic, personalized content is highly important on the web channel; 43% of respondents say that their biggest marketing challenge (3rd in votes) is how they can increase business metrics like customer retention; 57% of respondents say that their biggest marketing challenge are the conversion rates (2nd in votes); real-time marketing is the potential cure to these challenges, real-time marketing’s greatest benefits being “marketing effectiveness” (higher conversion), and customer satisfaction and retention. Carpenter showed that the first and only real-time web personalization platform that covers every point that marketers have been waiting for in a web personalization solution was created by Evergage.

Finally, Carpenter stated that the real-time marketing means: “truly relevant, compelling engagement happens when you take into account the full picture of who someone is (past and current behavior) specifically with your business (not with what’s currently on TV).”

Next year, in May 2014, Michael A. Stelzner (Founder, Social Media Examiner, and Host, Social Media Marketing podcast) presented the 6th annual study of Social Media Holistic Marketing Management

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Marketing Industry. Let’s take a look at the primary findings revealed by Stelzner (Stelzner, 2014): marketers place very high value on social media (a significant 92% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2013); tactics and engagement are top areas marketers want to master (at least 89% of marketers want to know the most effective social tactics and the best ways to engage their audience with social media); blogging holds the top spot for future plans (a significant 68% of marketers plan on increasing their use of blogging, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2014); marketers want to learn most about Google+ (while 54% of marketers are using Google+, 65% want to learn more about it and 61% plan on increasing Google+ activities in 2014); podcasting on growth trajectory (only 6% of marketers are involved with podcasting, yet 21% plan on increasing their podcasting activities in 2014 – a more than three-fold increase - and 28% of marketers want to learn more about it); Facebook and LinkedIn are the two most important social networks for marketers (when forced to only select one platform, 54% of marketers selected Facebook, followed by LinkedIn at 17%); most marketers aren't sure their Facebook marketing is effective (only 34% of marketers slightly more than one in three - think that their Facebook efforts are effective); original written content is most important for social media marketing (a significant 58% of marketers stated that original written content is the single most important form of content, followed by original visual assets - 19%).

On the other hand, on August 19, 2014, eMarketer attracted the attention that (according to April 2014 polling by Useful Social Media, “The State of Corporate Social Media 2014”) (eMarketer, 2014) half of corporate execs can measure social's ROI, fewer than 34% of respondents of the mentioned study saying that they were accurately measuring social media’s effect, and the majority listed had dropped in usage of key performance indicators (KPIs) in 2014 than previously over the past few years. According to this study, in the last two years: the top KPI, engagement, had jumped 32%; sentiment tracking showed year-over-year growth of 38%; sales conversions and brand ambassadors (previously popular) dropped by 38% and 58%; web traffic as well as followers, fans and group size (simple and relatively useless figures) ranked second and third, was “slightly disconcerting.” But we also have to take into account that more than 50% of organizations do not differentiate Social Media Marketing (the use of social media spaces for marketing) from Social Business (using the elements above to enable more efficient, effective, and net-new connections between people, information, and assets to drive business decision, action, and outcome across the enterprise). (DiMauro, 2014) Another definition used in this context (adapted by Vanessa DiMauro from a Deloitte’s study: The Social Business Initiative) was for Social Media (the spaces where we interact with one another over the web, including public, private and semi-private spaces defined within, and by certain contexts).

Within the same context, the following aspect was underlined: marketing typically leads their organizations’ social media strategy 50% of the time, and but chart the social business strategy course in only 32% of firms.

A month before , on July 21, 2014, Hana Abaza (director of marketing at Toronto-based content marketing and lead nurturing platform provider Uberflip), underlined seven marketing Holistic Marketing Management

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deadly sins (Abaza, 2014): marketing without metrics (not combining a metrics-driven approach with the creativity); marketing in a silo (not communicating internally within the marketing team and to other departments, and not talking to potential and existing customers so as to keep a pulse on them); no audience segmentation (not understanding each segment and not speaking directly to the individuals in the specific segment); no process for experimentation (not understanding that testing is often the missing ingredient); “spray & pray” marketing (not focusing on how your content is actually converting customers); too much “selling”, not enough “nurturing” (not creating valuable content around the target audiences' interests); “set it and forget it” marketing (not having a process in place for iteration and optimization, and not focusing on optimizing conversion rates across emails or landing pages). It is also worth to mention (and compare), within this context, the “seven deadly sins of mobile marketing” (Jarsky, 2014) underlined in the infographic of TextMarketer (a provider of business SMS services http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/): forgetting a call to action (CTA; customers need to know what you expect them to do); forgetting to test and check for errors (readability, contact details, website addresses, spelling, grammar, phone numbers); no option to unsubscribe; treat everyone the same; overloading customers (spamming customers); focus only on selling; develop a pointless app.

As we all know, within the context of organizations developing purchase funnel models (that show how marketing and advertising efforts affect consumer attitudes and behavior) in order to make effective marketing decisions, there is a real need to quantify results, and “one of the major ways results can be measured are by looking at Return on Investment (ROI), which measures the relative efficiency of various marketing tactics (such as advertising/promotion mix, media mix, scheduling options, etc.) against marketplace performance (typically reported as sales results)”. (The Association of Magazine Media) CMO can respond to the complex challenges they actually face only by thoughtfully and systematically applying investment fundamentals to marketing, being necessary to boost marketing’s ROI. (Court, Gordon & Perrey, 2005) There is no doubt about the importance of reinforcing and embedding ROI thinking in the daily marketing approach.

Peter Rosenwald (Rosenwald, 2004), an industry leader with broad experience (accountablemarketing.info/author.htm) in every aspect of the application of direct and datadriven marketing to a wide range of businesses (well-known for his constant pledge for the necessity of accountability in marketing and CRM), highlighted the struggling of marketing managers for new rules and measurements to use in the new world of measurable performance: understanding the economics of the marketing continuum and where begins the accountability, determining the allowable cost per name for a customer database, localizing the most effective and efficient integrated marketing database, knowing where marketing managers want to go and what is the best and most economical way of getting there, thinking of “contribution and/or profit” as a “cost”, understanding that good content is the most important churn reducer, that incentives come in all forms and sizes, and that testing and archiving are the foundation stone for Holistic Marketing Management

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marketing improvement, considering the most likely prospects are almost always better and less expensive and that the “household” is a better marketing unit than the “individual”, establishing the right balance between catalog customers and prospects, moving the customer up the value ladder and selling a variety of goods, understanding that the prospect is almost always multidimensional.

On May 20, 2013 Laura Ramos attracted the attention that (according to the research study launched by Forrester together with the ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing – VEM, in April, the 12th year that VEM has undertaken this research): “B2B marketers continue to struggle to prove marketing's contribution to the business instead of using metrics and performance management to improve it… Marketers say just 9% of CEOs and 6% of CFOs use marketing data to help set corporate direction… the vast majority of marketing dashboards… report marketing activity rather than business outcomes, which are metrics executives can’t use to chart a business strategy. Instead, marketing measures and analysis should show how marketing moves the needle on topline growth or profitability.” (Ramos, 2013) On July 31, 2014, Laura Patterson (Patterson, 2014) attracted our attention that the purpose of measuring must extend beyond just collecting metrics (budget-to-expense ratios, ontime delivery, people-to-budget ratios, response rates, click-through rates, website traffic and activity, media mentions, article views and shares, fans, followers etc.), avoiding a timeconsuming, meaningless exercise, and focusing on to demonstrate how marketing is creating (customers believe they received at least what they expected, if not more, for the price they paid) and capturing (the value of the customer exceeds the cost to acquire or retain the customer) customer value, taking into account both, the opportunity to measure customer value, and the power that has shifted from sellers to buyers (thanks to the increased pricing transparency, product commoditization, product/service customization capabilities, and the Internet). As tips for measuring value, Patterson recommends the followings: define the data (the types of data we collect); focus on customer intelligence (a quick assessment of customer supplier, touch point and channel preferences, buying criteria, buying processes, and buyer personas etc.); establish the right metrics (so as to fine-tune your initiatives and ensure you invest your limited resources the best way).

Next month, on August 25, 2014, Laura Patterson came back and showed some findings of the 2014 VisionEdge Marketing/ITSMA study, such as: “Best-in-class (BIC) marketers can be characterized as value creators because their primary focus is on using data to make market, customer, and product/service decisions that create value for customers and shareholders.

Accordingly, the following are top roles for marketing ops function among the value creators, in priority order: Customer, market, competitive intelligence, research, and insights; Analytics and predictive modeling; Data management; Campaign analysis and reporting; Budgeting and planning; financial governance and reporting; Organization benchmarking and assessments…

With the pressure increasing on Marketing to measure its value and contribution, Marketing Ops is the logical entity to champion and orchestrate the six A's of marketing performance

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management: alignment, accountability, analytics, automation, alliances and assessment.”

(Patterson, 2014) On August 13, 2014, Scott Vaughan (CMO at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based marketing software and media services provider Integrate) recommended a strategy that will generate improvements in defined areas of marketing performance and increase credibility with stakeholders by delivering measurable business results (Vaughan, 2014). He started from the fact that analytics involves in marketing, more specifically, the studying of historical data to research potential trends, analyze the effects of certain decisions or events, or evaluate the performance of a given tool or program. According to Vaughan, in order to properly measure marketing and business outcomes, marketers must ask themselves three fundamental questions: Who are we developing/adopting the analytics for (marketing managers may need more real-time or frequent data while business leaders/analysts may only require a monthly or quarterly summary)? What exactly do we need to measure (to start with the end-game and work backward is one of the best ways to develop an analytics program)? Are our analytics actionable (you need to know why you got generated clicks or which content performed best)?

On August 14, 2014, Heather Fletcher mentioned a few statistics (Fletcher, 2014) about content marketing (according to HubSpot’s “2013 State of Inbound Marketing” research: content marketing yields positive ROI – 41% of marketers; positive ROI for their inbound marketing – 82% of blogging marketers; inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than outbound marketing.

As relationships today are built with information, it is very important to understand the process of inbound marketing as a way of looking at the customer relationship that parallels any other, by determining whether there is a mutual attraction, and by building a relationship based on shared interests and values, taking into account that according to Forrester buyers are 60% of the way to a decision before they contact sales. (MarketingProfs.com) According to other opinions (Nickerson, 2014), it is worth to evaluate the balance between inbound marketing (which build communities and relationships with company’ customers and prospects by authoring books or eBooks, sponsoring events, writing articles, public relations, blogging, public speaking, content creation, SEO, video content, social media marketing and anything else that’s not commonly associated with direct marketing - Nickerson, 2014) and outbound marketing (“interruption marketing”, traditional forms of marketing: print ads, online display ads, TV commercials, radio commercials, billboards, trade show booths, cold calls, sales letters and bulk email blasts to purchased or rented lists etc. - Nickerson, 2014) currently done in the company, because, for example: if the sales pipeline is thin or needs a boost, could be necessary putting more into outbound marketing; if the pipeline is doing okay right now, could be necessary putting more towards inbound marketing. But in both cases it is necessary, according to Nickerson, spending at least some portion of company’ resources towards building up the inbound marketing as a lifestyle choice.

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The superpowers of marketing, and major hindrances to marketing automation success At the end of 2013, we find out, thanks to the well-known Harward Business Review Blog Network, that in order (Bonchek & France, 2014 ): to win customers’ hearts and minds marketers need to master the latest technology, assimilate vast quantities of data, engage and delight their more connected and empowered than ever before customers, and deliver products and services that surpass their expectations; to generate extraordinary results today’s top marketers are combining technology and teamwork. Following their talk with dozens of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in Silicon Valley about the qualities that define extraordinary marketing, Mark Bonchek and Cara France identified five marketing capabilities that in their most refined form border on superpowers: to hear what no one else can hear (using technology and teamwork to listen accordingly); to be part of the conversation, even when you’re not in the room (the exponentially explosion of the conversations about products and companies thanks to social media); to leap tall piles of data in a single bound (finding meaningful insights, making split-second decisions, and creating truly relevant experiences thanks to digital devices which generate a mountain of information); to make silos disappear (creating a vision for an exceptional customer experience and connecting everyone in the organization to the delivery of that seamless experience); to bring out the superpowers in others (recognizing the importance of building great teams and cultivate a superpower of bringing out the superpowers in others).

In an interview (Wenig, 2014) with eBay’s Devin Wenig (president of eBay Marketplaces) conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Simon London in April 2014, it was underlined from the very beginning that technology is enabling the creation of a single global online marketplace, Internet (fuelled by the availability of information and electronic financial flows) enabling truly global commerce. Wenig showed that 20 percent of eBay’s (one of the world’s largest online markets) overall business is cross-border, and everywhere in cross-border trade there are both, friction (in currency, payment, trust, government rules and regulations, language - which inhibits the global trade), and opportunities (created by solving the mentioned problems, working with partners to fulfill, to deliver at the last mile, and using the sharing economy (services-based marketplaces that help balance supply and demand).

On July 28, 2014, Ayaz Nanji made reference to a recent report of Ascend 2 and Research Partners (Marketing Automation Benchmark, July 2014, based on data from a survey of 291 global marketing, sales, and business professionals) showing major hindrances to marketing automation success (Nanji, 2014): the lack of an effective strategy (45% of global marketers); budget limitations (44% of marketers cite as a challenging obstacle); lack of skilled staff (40%); insufficient data quality (34%); lack of management buy-in (23%); the difficult-touse interfaces of marketing automation software tools (22%). Additional key findings concerned: satisfaction and goals (current marketing automation efforts are somewhat successful - 69%, very successful - 24%, not successful - 7%; improving productivity is one of their top goals for marketing automation - 45%; increasing sales revenue is a top goal - 44%); resources and tools Holistic Marketing Management

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(company handles all of its marketing automation efforts in-house - 52%, use a combo of inhouse and outsourced resources - 41%, fully outsource - 7%; the quality of analytics and reporting tools is a top factor in choosing a marketing automation system - 41%; ease of use as a top factor - 40%; look for an all-in-one solution - 34%); metrics (say knowing the rate at which leads are converted is one of the most useful metrics to measure marketing automation performance - 57%, revenue generated is a key metric - 42%, cite lead generation ROI - 40%) .

A more collaborative working relationship between CMOs and CIOs, and the optimism of CMOs about the current business environment On July 30, 2014, a recent report (based on data from a survey of 1,147 senior marketing and IT executives from around the world: 37% working for B2C-focused companies; 28%, B2B; and 35%, hybrid) of Accenture, highlighted that (Nanji, 2014): some 43% of CMOs and 50% of CIOs say their relationship with the other has improved over the past year, while 23% of respondents say collaboration between the two groups is currently at the right level, up substantially from the 10% of respondents who last year said collaboration was at the right level.

But there are considerable differences concerning various issues such as the speed at which new digital initiatives are being implemented. Other key findings of the report pointed to: alignment (more than half of CMOs -52%, and CIOs - 53%, say keeping marketing and IT departments aligned is a top priority; most respondents agree on the top five marketing-IT priorities: customer experience, customer analytics, social media, corporate website, and other Web development); digital divide (company's IT team doesn't understand the urgency of integrating new data sources into campaigns - 40% of CMOs; technology development process is too slow for the speed required for digital marketing - 43% of CMOs; marketing requirements and priorities change too often for them to keep up - 43% of CIOs; CMOs lack the vision to anticipate new digital channels , compared with just 11% who expressed that view last year - according to 25% of CIOs).

A month later, in August 2014, another recent report (based on data from a survey of 525 CMO Council members around the world; 41% of respondents focused on B2B markets, 23% on B2C, and 35% hybrid) from the CMO Council displayed the following opinions of the respondents (Nanji, 2014): management mandates for top-line revenue growth and market share in 2014 are realistic and attainable - 81%; 55% plan headcount additions in 2014, compared with 22% who expect reductions; their own jobs are at risk - 10%; 54% have increased budgets in 2014 compared with 2013. Additional key findings from this recent report from the CNO Council highlighted three directions: digital focus and spend (59% of chief marketers list â&#x20AC;&#x153;digital marketing makeoverâ&#x20AC;? - involving platforms, programs, and people - as the number one transformational project in 2014; top areas of digital marketing investment include email marketing, website performance optimization, mobile applications, lead management, website design and development, and search marketing; the top reason for deploying new digital solutions and cloud-based services: improved efficiency and campaign effectiveness ; between Holistic Marketing Management

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10% and 30% of their budgets allocated to digital marketing in 2014 - > 70% of respondents ); effectiveness and performance (gave themselves an A+ in digital marketing performance - 6%; “getting better by growing capabilities and improving measurement” - 54%; planning to maximize the impact and value of marketing through improved customer segmentation and targeting in 2014 - 63%, but only 6% see themselves as leaders in big data management, compared with 62% who view themselves as just keeping pace or lagging behind competitors etc.); relationships with peers (today's CMO is equal to other C-level peers - nearly 30%, while 45% say that is sometimes the case; CMOs are most inclined to partner and interact with chief financial officers -58% do so, chief information officers - 53%, and chief sales officers - 51%; while as the top professional objective for the majority of respondents in 2014 is seen the increasing collaboration with Sales and/or channel organizations was listed).

Strategies for Transforming Customer Experience, and Customer-Centricity, a focused strategy In May 2014, Ernan Roman (one of the “2014 Top 40 Digital Luminaries” according to Online Marketing Institute; one of the “100 most influential people in Business Marketing” according to Crain’s BtoB Magazine), President of Ernan Roman Direct Marketing, approached the proper strategies for transforming the customer experience. Ernan Roman (author of both, “Voice of the Customer Marketing”, and well-known Huffington Post published blog “Ernan’s Insights on Marketing Best Practices”) is considered an industry thought leader, being inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame thanks to the three Customer Experience methodologies he created: Voice of Customer Relationship Research, Integrated Direct Marketing, and Opt-in Marketing. Based on insights from industry thought leaders and research findings from thousands of hours of Voice of Customer (VoC) research, Roman recommended – in what concerns helping to engage customers and prospects in a competitively differentiating, multichannel experience (Roman, 2014) - five strategies for transforming the customer experience: 1) Understand How Customers Define “Customer Experience”; (2) Satisfaction Has Become a Given. Engagement is Now the Critical Competitive Differentiator; (3) Rethink How You Engage With Customers; the Reciprocity of Value Equation; (4) Provide Personalized Experiences and Communication; (5) Achieve a Multichannel Experience. Roman also identified 12 action items to help transform your customer experience, the final one being this: “Deliver

high quality customer service in every channel. Marketing has to take responsibility!”

As not all the prospects or customers are the same, in today time of the competitive advantage derived from remarkable customer experience, customer-centricity (Henderson & Weber, 2014) can be defined as helping the prospects and customers achieve their goals in a way that makes sense for the company, and as agility, relentlessly pursuing improvement and innovation by: prioritizing the efforts on those customer needs and desires that the company can serve well and profitably, while operating in a place of shared value, integrating and analyzing Holistic Marketing Management

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the customer data so that the company can predict the customer lifetime and referral values of its customers, and defining accordingly the markets and pursuing more focused and profitable value propositions; treating each of the prospects and customers the company choose to serve personally, by taking customer understanding to the level of the individual and differentiating company’ products, services, and experiences accordingly; involving constant iteration, testing the effectiveness of the content and experiences, learning what works, and then scaling as appropriate, by staying close to the customers to uncover emerging and latent needs and testing hypotheses (quickly and at a low cost) about demand with small-scale experiments that replace speculation with reality, and make pivots to company strategy as necessary.

On August 11, 2014, Andrew Rudin (a BS in marketing and an MS in information technology, both from the University of Virginia; successful background as a technology sales strategist, marketer, account executive, and product manager), Managing Principal of Contrary Domino Partners approached an interesting topic (Rudin, 2014): “CapitalOne Digital’s New Architecture of Customer Centricity: People, Process, and an Awesome High-Tech Office”.

Rudin stated that yesterday’s office is dead, and the office of the future will inspire life, creativity, and innovation. His guided tour (by Tom Poole, CapitalOne Digital’s Managing Vice President for Mobile Payments and Commerce) provided a glimpse into some exciting resources that CapitalOne Digital has developed: Device bar; Social media command center; Design Studio; Usability Lab; Large galley and game room area; Room for outside groups to meet and congregate. He concluded that: “CapitalOne Digital… places paramount importance on knowing its customers, fostering effective collaboration inside the office, and, by joining these two, enhancing ability for developers to create something valuable for people to use”.

Marketing tactics from the 2014 World Cup, lean content marketing, the buyer’s journey, and the constant need to reevaluate the marketing strategies On July 22, 2014, Josh Haynam highlighted 10 marketing plays that helped the 2014 World Cup become the most watched in history, considering that similar tactics can be used in most every marketer’s plan (Haynam, 2014): use controversy to your advantage; highlight personal stories; categorize/segment your audience; have a clear goal; understand the public perception of your product; remove barriers, but set boundaries; create snippets worth remembering; create content tailored for your audience; use what you have in various ways; partner up with complementary people.

Yes, indeed, content is king, is tough for any marketer, it is the fuel for company lead generation and nurturing programs, driving leads through the marketing funnel to become customers, because today’s buyer is different taking into account that due to the abundance of information on the internet, 66–90% of the buyer’s journey is complete before he even reaches out to a sales person. In order to master lean content marketing, it is necessary to assign the right

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roles, mapping content to buyer personas and buying journeys, and becoming experts at repurposing the existing assets.

Allow us to remember that in August 2013 (Jacobs, 2013), Tom Jacobs (founder and president of Jacobs Agency, a Chicago-based agency that helps companies untangle their business problems through marketing communications) recommended - in order to implement buyer journey marketing from a lead generation perspective - five crucial guidelines for organizations: prepare your marketing and sales organizations for a shift (from the organization’s need to roll out new offerings or increase market share) to the customer’s desire to resolve a business issue (marketing and sales processes and metrics need to be aligned to support the buyer-focused approach); don’t guess at buyer needs (the expectation of all marketing communications today is that the customers’ behavior should dictate what comes next); step up your segmentation (every organization should try to find an aggregation of behaviors or buyers in various stages); commit to content (conduct a content audit and organize all previously developed content by the various phases of the buying cycle); get ready to manage multichannel execution (multichannel communications and marketing automation are essential, but these are not the only hallmarks of becoming buyer-journey-oriented, it starts in the organization’s processes for innovation, product/solution management, customer segmentation and marketing strategies).

Coming back to the well-known Harward Business Review Blog Network, this time looking at the month of August 2014 posts (Joshi, 2014), we remarked the pledge for inspiring and effective marketing, by underlining of the necessity for marketers of not relying too heavily on analytics, but on the so-called the “both-brain” approach (which now is gathering speed and will become essential to future marketing success), by making the right balance between creativity and analytics. And this requires a change in mindset and organizational culture, a concerted effort involving at least four steps: set the right tone at the top (leaders have to acknowledge and champion the change that’s needed and model the necessary behavior, refining and perfecting the creative content based on a data-driven analysis of live feedback from the marketplace); integrate both approaches into the production cycle (moving to shorter creative cycles punctuated by frequent testing, analysis and revision; marketing that is more engaging, better targeted, and much more effective at driving results); design clear decision-making processes (identifying the specific decisions that could benefit from analytic insights, clarifying the criteria used to make each decision, and only then gathering the required data and perform the needed analyses; clear roles to both analytic and creative team members for each of these key decisions); nourish both-brain skills with thoughtful training and incentives (seeking out, hiring, and promoting both creative and analytic talent; cross-training team members on the importance of both left-brain and right-brain skills; co-locating the two groups and creating both-brain teamlets that work together on multiple campaigns over time, rewarding the individuals involved).

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And as a conclusion at the level of the month of August 2014 posts (Roman, 2014), and in accordance with the actuality of the constant need to reevaluate the marketing strategies (a critical priority for marketers) it is worth coming back to Ernan Roman (who is considering that innovation is marketing’s best friend) recommendations to act with speed and agility in addressing key customer needs and expectations: empowering the buyer to become an active participant in their experience; increasing relevance; increasing differentiation and engagement; solving problems and needs. As a critical priority for marketers is the reevaluation of the current marketing strategies to determine if they are achieving key objectives (competitively differentiating the brand and engaging customers across the multichannel mix), Roman highlighted 7 game changing marketing trends (which can transform the quality, relevance and ROI of your marketing) you need to consider as you reevaluate your strategies: Extreme Creativity (to help you achieve competitive differentiation in an increasingly cluttered and distracted market); New Technology (to enhance user experiences at every touch point, by understanding how your specific customers want to use technology to improve their experience with your brand); True Personalization (83% of consumers see value in being recognized with personalized experiences across channels. - according to the 6th Annual Personalization Consumer Survey); Leveraging the Power of Community (turning passive buyers into active brand contributors, by giving brands relevant consumer insights about market preferences); Embracing the real customer journey (making it simple and easy for people to do business with you, by understanding the path to purchase lets); Multiscreen communication (68% of consumers engage in “content grazing,” multi-tasking using several devices at once - according to Microsoft Advertising’s Cross-Screen Engagement study); Location based marketing (the ability to use location to target consumers with messages based on where they are).

Yes, indeed, Marketing has to take responsibility, and confirm that innovation is its best friend, not forgetting that anyone who pulls Marketing in new directions must look inward as well as outward… This integration of looking both inward and outward is the most powerful formula for creating long-term, high-impact Marketing Thinking change!”

References John D. Louth - The changing face of marketing, McKinsey Quarterly, September 1966, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Marketing_Sales/The_changing_face_of_marketing?cid=other-eml-cls-mipmck-oth-1407 Greg Verdino - The Long-Term View of Near-Term Change, July 23, 2014, available at: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140723170841-416864-the-long-term-view-of-near-term-change Greg Verdino - Strategy is change, November 18, 2013, available at: http://gregverdino.com/strategy-is-change/ Nate Boaz and Erica Ariel Fox - Change leader, change thyself, McKinsey Quarterly, March 2014, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/change_leader_change_thyself Theodor Purcarea, Monica Ratiu - On Effects of the Producer-Retailer-Consumer Relationship's Knowledge on the Marketing Future, International Scientific Conference "European Integration- New Chalenges for the Romanian Holistic Marketing Management

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Economy", Faculty of Economics, University of Oradea, 4th Edition, Oradea, 30-31 May 2008, Analele Universităţii din Oradea, Ştiinţe Economice, Tom XVII, 2008, volumul IV, Management and Marketing, pp. 11431152 Philip Kotler, Kevin Lane Keller - Marketing Management, Twelfth Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005, Pearson Education Inc., p. 5-6,13,16-17, 285, 300-303, 320-321, 721, 724 Vincent Grimaldi - The real danger comes from disconnects and inertia, 31 – Jan – 2005, available at: http://www.brandchannel.com; Vincent Grimaldi is managing partner of global strategy consultancy “The Grimaldi Group” Nirmalya Kumar - The Strategic Role of Marketing, Q&A by Manda Salls, 5/31/2004, available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4156.html Brad Berens - Don E. Schultz on What Companies Can Do to Integrate, iMedia Connection, December 06, 2006, available at: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/12698.asp#0 Al Ries - Understanding Marketing Psychology and the Halo Effect, April 17, 2006, available at: http://adage.com/article/al-ries/understanding-marketing-psychology-halo-effect/108676/ Jonah Bloom - Marketers Need to Stand Up to Hysteria From the Outrage Nuts, Ad Age Daily, Febuary 26, 2007, available at: http://adage.com/article/jonah-bloom/marketers-stand-hysteria-outrage-nuts/115154/ Michael Saren - Marketing is everything: the view from the street, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Volume 25, Issue 1 2007, p. 11-16, available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/02634500710722362 David Armano - When marketing feels shallow, go deep, Sunday, July 13, 2008, available at: http://darmano.typepad.com David Armano - Digital marketing needs a reboot, Friday, July 25, 2008, available at: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic David Armano - Unconventional marketing, Sunday, October 12, 2008, available at: http://darmano.typepad.com David Armano - Accidental marketers: The podcast, Sunday, October 23, 2008, available at: http://darmano.typepad.com Robert Passikoff - “Rules of Engagement”, February 2006, available at: www.chiefmarketer.com/rules_engagement_02132006 Tim Parker - The new rules of thought leadership marketing, April 16, 2010, available at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/ Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill - We’re all marketers now”, McKinsey Qurterly, July 2011, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/were_all_marketers_now Ben Straley - Six Things Every CMO Needs To Know In 2013, available at: www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2013/01/03/six-things-every-cmo-needs-to-know-in-2013/ www.mpdailyfix.com/whats-next-in-marketing-bold-predictions-for-2013/?adref=nlt011613 Rob Carpenter - Real-Time Marketing Isn’t What You Think It Is, available at: http://www.evergage.com/blog/realtime-marketing-isnt-what-you-think-it-is

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Real-time marketing insights study five keys to success for marketers, Conducted by Neolane and the Direct Marketing Association, July 2013, available at: http://www.neolane.com/Assets/neolane.comAssets/us-Assets/resources/pdf/RealTimeMarketing_eBook.pdf Michael A. Stelzner - 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses, May 2014, Social Media Examiner When It Comes to Social Measurement, Corporate Marketers Can't Get It Together, eMarketer, Aug 19, 2014, available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Comes-Social-Measurement-Corporate-MarketersCant-Together/1011115/2 Vanessa DiMauro - Highlights from the 2014 Social Business Benchmark Study, August 12, 2014, August 12, 2014, http://customerthink.com/highlights-from-the-2014-social-business-benchmark-study/ Hana Abaza - The 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing, July 21, 2014, available at: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/the-7-deadly-sins-marketing/1 Ver贸nica Maria Jarski - Seven Deadly Sins of Mobile Marketing, Infographic, August 2, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/print/2014/25712/seven-deadly-sins-of-mobile-marketing-infographic Accountability: A Guide to Measuring ROI and ROO Across Media, Magazine Publishers of America, New York, www.magazine.org/accountability, www.customores.com/ad_blues/Accountability_Study.pdf David C. Court, Jonathan W. Gordon, and Jesko Perrey - Boosting returns on marketing investment, McKinsey Quarterly, 2005 Peter Rosenwald - Accountable Marketing: The Economics of Data-Driven Marketing, South-Western Educational Pub; 1 edition, August 13, 2004 www.accountablemarketing.info/author.htm Laura Ramos - Marketing Performance Management Is Operationally Proficient But Strategically Stalled, available at: http://blogs.forrester.com/laura_ramos/13-05-20marketing_performance_management_is_operationally_proficient_but_strategically_stalled Laura Patterson - What You Should Measure in Your Marketing - and Why, July 31, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/print/2014/25703/what-you-should-measure-in-your-marketingand-why Laura Patterson - Marketing Ops Is Now a Must Have: The Six A's of Marketing Performance Management, August 25, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/print/2014/25875/marketing-ops-is-now-a-musthave-the-six-as-of-marketing-performance-management

Scott Vaughan - Marketing vs. Business Analytics, August 13, 2014, available at: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/marketing-vs-business-analytics-analytics-basics-world-big-data/1 Heather Fletcher - Give It Away Now! August 14, 2014, available at: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/content-marketing-freebies-give-it-away-now/1 Inbound Marketing: The Art of Attraction, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/store/product/2226/inbound-marketing-the-art-of-attraction#ixzz392l0TTQQ

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Kris Nickerson - Lead Generation: Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing, April 17, 2014, available at: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140417175149-8685044-lead-generation-inbound-marketing-versusoutbound-marketing Kris Nickerson - Lead Generation: Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing, April 17, 2014, available at: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140417175149-8685044-lead-generation-inbound-marketing-versusoutbound-marketing Kris Nickerson - Lead Generation: Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing, April 17, 2014, available at: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140417175149-8685044-lead-generation-inbound-marketing-versusoutbound-marketing Mark Bonchek and Cara France - The Five Superpowers of Marketing, PM December 2, 2013, available at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/the-five-superpowers-of-marketing/ Flow without friction: An interview with eBay’s Devin Wenig, McKinsey Global Institute, April 2014, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/operations/flow_without_friction_an_interview_with_ebays_devin_wenig Ayaz Nanji - 2014 Marketing Automation Benchmarks and Trends, July 28, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/print/2014/25658/2014-marketing-automation-benchmarks-and-trends Ayaz Nanji - Are Marketing and IT Execs United or Divided? [Infographic], July 30, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/print/2014/25675/are-marketing-and-it-execs-united-or-divided-infographic Ayaz Nanji - The State of Chief Marketers in 2014, August 18, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/print/2014/25811/the-state-of-chief-marketers-in-2014 Ernan Roman - 5 Strategies for Transforming Your Customer Experience, May 14, 2014, Ernan Roman Direct Marketing Corp., available at: http://www.erdm.com/resources.php#.U_NF3sIcTIU Lisa Leslie Henderson, Larry Weber - Serving Everyone Means Serving No One - and Other Truths About Customer-Centricity, July 24, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/print/2014/25640/serving-everyone-means-serving-no-oneand-othertruths-about-customer-centricity Andrew Rudin - CapitalOne Digital’s New Architecture of Customer Centricity: People, Process, and an Awesome High-Tech Office, August 11, 2014, available at: http://customerthink.com/capitalone-digitals-new-architecture-ofcustomer-centricity-people-process-and-an-awesome-high-tech-office/ Josh Haynam - 10 Marketing Lessons From the World Cup, July 22, 2014, available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/print/2014/25630/10-marketing-lessons-from-the-world-cup Lean Content Marketing. How to Create Content on a Budget, 2014 Marketo, Inc., eBook, available at: http://www.marketo.com/_assets/uploads/Lean-Content-Marketing.pdf?20140605095553 Tom Jacobs - Buyer Journey Marketing Is Hard: A Five-Step Guide to Making It Easier, August 2013, available at: http://jacobsagency.com/sites/default/files/resources/JA_BuyerJourneyMktg_POV.pdf Aditya Joshi - Use “Both-Brain” Marketing to Balance Creativity and Analytics, August 13, 2014, available at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/use-both-brain-marketing-to-balance-creativity-and-analytics/ Ernan Roman - 7 Game-Changing Marketing Trends to Engage Customers, Build Your Brand, August 15, 2014, available at: http://customerthink.com/7-game-changing-marketing-trends-to-engage-customers-build-your-brand/

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Chief Marketing Officer and the Challenge of Digital Maturity Dr. Costel Iliuță NEGRICEA Ioan Matei PURCĂREA Abstract Digital is the new normal today, the digitally transformation allowing step by step a closer connection with customers, and accordingly answer to the new requirements of the supply chain management. The rules of engagement are changed by the digital lives of customers, the digital leaders creating value across physical/digital products, services, and experience. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is proving a more devoted personal attention and a more directly involvement in digital initiatives, the leading marketers wanting greater levels of integration in their digital marketing suite, and embracing new social and mobile location-based tactics. Digital customer engagement became a top strategic priority, followed closely by the digital innovation of products, operating models, or business models. As customers expect seamless integration of digital and analog channels, in today omnichannel world, it is necessary to understand that seamless internal integration should be the end goal. There is no doubt that few business functions have been as profoundly disrupted by digitization as marketing, which is challenged to offer something for each of the customers within the context of a more company’s interactivity with more empowered customers, while facing particular challenges.

Key words: Digitally Transformation; Digital Maturity; Chief Marketing Officer; Digital Marketing, Digital Customer Engagement JEL Classification: L81, L86, M15, M31, O33

Steps and Obstacles to Digital Transformation on the Way to Digital Maturity, Turning Technology into Transformation

In Holistic Marketing Management, Volume 4, Issue 2, Year 2014, (Negricea & Purcarea, 2014) we argued that the fierce competition forces firms to exploit digital technologies, to focus on market imperatives and to demonstrate a deep commitment to these digital empowered intelligent customers that disrupts every industry. There is no doubt that companies that master relevant data flow and improve the performance of employees who are at the forefront in dealing with customers have an advantage, on the background of the ongoing battle to acquire new customers, retain existing customers and improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, create consistent, relevant and positive experiences across marketing channels.

Within the new digital business context, we were drawing a parallel with the pillars of the shopping experience and even identified pillars of experience of the “shopper” of knowledge necessary to address “the digital”, managing to point a link to one top of the challenges for digital marketing, beginning with measurements , analysis and ROI of digital marketing programs, and the need to unify and integrate in the “digital” and with what is “traditional” (not Holistic Marketing Management

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forgetting taking into account that mobile is quickly becoming primary choice for customer engagement, the front line for customer experience).

According to Sandeep Raut (Director for BI & Analytics in Syntel), Digital is the new normal today as companies are forced to quickly adapt (a make-or-break proposition) to Digital Transformation (using Social Media, Mobility, Big Data Analytics & Cloud), and quickly deliver digitally instrumented products or services. (Raut, 2014) This digitally transformation allows step by step a closer connection with customers, speeding up the pace of innovation and to rapidly optimizing the value chain, so as to answer accordingly to the new requirements of the supply chain management. Raut underlined that the rules of engagement are changed by the digital lives of customers, and gave examples of companies (such as Nike and Burberry) which became digital leaders by creating value across physical/digital products, services, and experience (moving from their initial status of providers of traditional consumer goods). In the same time he took a look a MIT Sloan Management Review article referring to 3 pillars and 9 building blocks for Digital Transformation.

But before analyzing this MIT Sloan Management Review article (January 07, 2014) allow as to make reference to two other articles (written by the same author, Michael Fitzgerald, starting with just a year ago) from the same reputable review: “Eight Steps to Digital Transformation”, August 02, 2013, (Fitzgerald, 2013) and “The Nine Obstacles to Digital Transformation”, October 17, 2013. (Fitzgerald, 2013) In the first one, started from the fact that getting real transformation from technology involves taking both management skills and technology chops, and highlighted the following points of a wide-ranging discussion between distinguished representatives of well-known companies (Intel, Zipcar, Capgemini Consulting) and Andy McAfee of MIT’s Center for Digital Business: See beyond the hype (beyond the beginning of this next generation of computing: mobile, social media, analytics and embedded sensors and cloud computing); Technologies don’t change companies, companies change companies (the way that you actually put it all together is really transformative); Find wellspoken technologists (avoiding inertia and the complacency by keeping scanning the technology landscape and explaining it to the rest of the management team); Don’t throw up your hands (choosing wisely what to do with the new technologies); Experiment (being cheap to run a pilot or a test, and get feedback with most new technologies); Swarm (the work style of the future, according to Intel, is by sending a “swarm” of people to work on different functions, and after the project is finished, to disband and go work on another project). The second quoted article started from the fact that companies envision a better bottom line by investing billions in technology (seen as a way to transform operations, customer relationships, or build new business models), but are vexed by the digital transformation in practice. The author of the article (also first author of the Research Report) referred to the Research Report 2013 of MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with Capgemini Consulting (“Embracing Digital Technology: A New Strategic Imperative” - Fitzgerald et all., 2013), which underlined nine nightmares: Lack of urgency; Lack of vision; Unaligned management; Bad attitudes; Old technology; The pace of change; Internal politics; Measuring; Lack of incentives. Let’s show two Holistic Marketing Management

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other key findings from the Research Report: achieving digital transformation will become critical to their organizations within the next two years - 78% of respondents; where CEOs have shared their vision (a mere 36% of CEOs have shared such a vision) for digital transformation, 93% of employees feel that it is the right thing for the organization. The Research Report concluded: “… CEO and senior leadership must develop a vision to articulate to the staff, create a road map and commit to it, and then rally the organization with measurable goals and incentives to reach them. Digital transformation needs to come from the top…. Companies should take small steps, via pilots and skunkworks, and invest in the ones that work…”

Coming back to the first mentioned MIT Sloan Management Review article from January 07, 2014 – “The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation” (Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee, 2014) – it is worth to underline that the authors interviewed 157 executives in 50 companies to find out where to look for “digital transformation” (seen as the use of technology to radically improve performance or reach of enterprises) opportunities, and expressed their opinion that the best companies (called “Digirati”) combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation (this being called “Digital Maturity”). They revealed a set of building blocks for digital transformation consisting from three pillars (1. Customer experience: Improve Customer Understanding with Analytics – customer behavior, segmentation; Enhance Top-Line Growth with digital products like smart Phone, iPads, real time predictive marketing; Digitized Customer Touch Points – Social media to answer complaints, self service via Apps, increased multi-channel usage; 2. Operational processes: Process Digitization with automation, adding new features; Staff Enablement with virtualization of work space working anytime, anywhere; Performance Management decision making based on data with deeper insights into Customers, Products, Regions ; 3. Business models: Digitally Modified Businesses – augment physical with digital offerings, share contents across organization; Introduce New Digital Businesses, as Nike introduced fuel bands, (nike.com, 2014) by using movement sensors many daily activities are now measured and taken into account, adding to your total daily point total (store.apple.com, 2012); Digital Globalization – use of Global shared services to promote efficiency, from multi-national to global presence), each of these three pillars having three different changing elements. The authors also explain that in order to move forward in the manner that they believe is right for their organizations, executives are selecting among these mentioned building blocks, no studied company transforming all nine areas at once.

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), a more devoted personal attention and a more directly involvement in digital initiatives in 2014 There is no doubt that we are billions of navigators in this digital world, defined by our complex choices and our distinct ways of working and even getting comfort for what we think this digital world is and will be.(Purcarea, 2014) We have seen that: as businesses navigate further into the digital age, companies must make a first step toward bringing IT and marketing (needing greater access to analytics and data often exists in siloed databases with reporting or Holistic Marketing Management

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business intelligence personnel acting as gatekeepers) together by understanding and acknowledging each department’s business goals, being recommended entering the Chief Marketing Technologist, as a bridge builder and an embedded tech expert, by providing insight on how marketing can make the most of existing and emerging technologies, and reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), while CMO and CIO (Chief Information Officer) should share oversight equally (Galloway); in “The second economy”: “digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible - thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution… with the digital transformation fewer of us in the future may have whitecollar business process jobs; the second economy (silently forming, vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive) is creating a new economic world and we must adapt (Arthur, 2011); according to “The State of Marketing 2013”, IBM’s Global Survey of Marketers, (Wright & Franks, 2013) the leading marketers want greater levels of integration in their digital marketing suite, and are embracing new social and mobile location-based tactics; in February 2014, there was a recommendation (The Open University, 2014) to think of the internet more as a market, and of the relationship between a business and a customer, like the relationship between a doctor and a patient.

According to “The digital tipping point, McKinsey Global Survey results”, (McKinsey.com, 2014) June 2014 (an online survey in the field from April 8 to April 18, 2014; responses from 850 C-level executives representing the full range of regions, industries, and company sizes), digitization has become a critical asset in many companies’ quest for growth, building competitive advantage in an existing business or creating new business and tap new profit pools constituting the strategic intent of the executives behind their digital programs. Now than ever before, CEOs, CMOs, CFOs and other C-level executives are devoting more of their personal attention and are more directly involved in digital initiatives, even expecting (more than half of executives) that at least 15 percent of their companies’ growth in the next three years will be driven by digital, the largest share of their digital growth in the coming years coming from digital customer engagement (digital customer engagement being ranked as a top strategic priority) , followed closely by the digital innovation of products, operating models, or business models. Executives acknowledge that their companies are underinvesting in big data and analytics, and predict that big data will become a higher spending priority in three years’ time.

Two principals and a Director and in McKinsey’s London office argued in May this year (Olanrewaju, Smaje and Willmott, 2014) that the foundation of any digital transformation is a healthy obsession with improving the customer experience, being very important to implement processes that enable companies to capture and learn from every customer interaction. And as customers expect seamless integration of digital and analog channels, in today omnichannel world, it is necessary to understand that seamless internal integration should be the end goal (the authors gave an example with Wal-Mart approach of turning its e-commerce business into a separate vertical with its own profit and loss, taking “ring fencing” – making sure that money intended for a particular purpose is not use for anything else (macmillandictionary.com, 2014) – Holistic Marketing Management

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to the extreme). On the other hand, it is also important to focus on customer- or partner-facing initiatives, by optimizing optimizing back-office functions (the authors gave an example with Starbucks approach, one-third of the active IT projects in 2013 being devoted to improving efficiency and productivity away from the retail stores, and one-third focused on improving resilience and security). And as one Report (oracle.com, 2012) found that 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience, it is also very important to know that customers are less accepting of bad experiences and expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa. The mentioned Report also showed that: consumers want personal and engaging experiences that develop into relationships; 79% percent of consumers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored; 50% of consumers give a brand only one week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them; 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience.

Within this framework, allow us to highlight that Ikea, the home-furnishings retailer wellknown for its obsession with improving the customer experience, creates omnichannel shopping experience from favorite items in app, (Hamstra, 2014) the new app being unveiled in conjunction with the release of its 2015 catalog. The new mobile functionality allows users of the mobile catalog (focused on bathroom and bedroom furnishings, the theme being: “Where the Everyday Begins and Ends”) application: to save their favorite items as a shopping list to be used on the Web site or in-store; to create shopping lists compiled from multiple IKEA publications; to designate items as favorites with a “star” and then add those items to shopping lists (which can then be married to individual store locations so as to check in-stock levels or can be added to the checkout cart for online ordering; these lists cite both the regular price and the price customers would pay if they were members of the IKEA Family loyalty program). The posting of the catalog’s offerings is promoted by the home-furnishings retailer via various social media (including Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter) with the hashtag #IkeaCatalog, being usual for IKEA catalog app users: to gain access to extended content also by scanning designated pages of the printed catalog; to virtually place and view nearly 300 IKEA products in their own homes, thanks to an augmented reality “Place in Your Room” feature included in the extended content.

Meeting customer needs in today world where physical and virtual environments are rapidly converging. Particular Challenges in Mastering Digital Marketing In June 2014 eMarketer brought to us some interesting informations (eMarketer) from the well-developed UK market for retail ecommerce (showing the difference between digital shoppers and digital buyers, and estimating that 93.0% of internet users in UK will be digital shoppers in 2014, while 88.0% will be digital buyers; total retail sales:13.0% in 2014, 17.6% by 2018), underlining that according to a March 2014 study by Redshift Research (for marketing firm Sailthru): 60% of digital shoppers were frequenting their favorite online stores at least weekly (only 10% said they weren’t frequent digital shoppers); in-store remains a big hitter (90% of the respondents of a November 2013 study conducted by Ipsos MediaCT for the Institute of Holistic Marketing Management

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Practitioners in Advertising, asked those 15 and older in Great Britain what they considered their primary shopping channel to be, cited a physical store), not just in terms of sales volumes, but also in terms of consumer sentiment, so being folly to ignore the high street, despite the fact that digital commerce is becoming big business in the UK. Indeed, on Jul 15, 2014, eMarketer reconfirmed (eMarketer) the fact that the physical store remains the primary shopping channel in the UK, in-store shopping being popular even among internet users, what is particularly true for seniors (but who are beginning to involve digital in at least some of their shopping considerations). eMarketer cited two 2014 reports: a March 2014 polling by Retail Week in association with British Telecom (BT) that revealed that 54.6% of UK internet users ages 55 and over shopped mostly in-store, while 14.8% of over-54s said they researched online and then bought in-store, vs. 19.5% of 18- to 24-year-olds who did so; a January 2014 research by YouGov for VoucherCodes.co.uk found that seniors seemed much less encumbered by any concerns around online shopping, when it came to a direct comparison with millennials (ages 18 to 24).

As it is very important to also know how digital shoppers are finding your videos (knowing, for example, that YouTube is a godsend to marketers, and should be a part of every company’s marketing strategy), it is also worth to note that at the beginning of August this year, another important online publication, Target Marketing, cited Michael Rolfe, digital marketing executive of London-based digital marketing firm Koozai, who said: “YouTube Insight will tell you how people are finding your videos, and how many views certain search terms are bringing in. This may give you ideas on different words you can use to describe your content that better reflect what people are searching for, which can help you optimize your content and increase traffic.” (Dysart, 2014) The author of the cited article, Joe Dysart (an Internet speaker and business consultant based in New York) made also reference to Michael Miller (who wrote “YouTube for Business” – Miller, 2011), who recommends (because most people don’t expect overly slick production on a YouTube video) posting multiple marketing videos on YouTube to get higher on the radar of Google. And as Michael Miller argued: “YouTube is a terrific channel for generating direct sales for products and services. All you have to do is show the product in action or provide a clip of the service in question, and then ask for the sale by directing the viewer to your own website… Developing a YouTube marketing strategy is similar to developing any marketing strategy. You need to focus on your customer (audience), your message, your products/services/brand, and the other elements of your marketing mix. Everything has to work together to bring your chosen message to your chosen customer, and generate the desired results. You can’t just shoot a video and throw it on the YouTube site; you need to develop a plan.” (Miller, 2011) According to the opinion expressed in June this year by McKinsey representatives, in order to succeed in omnichannel marketing and sales (“effectively using big data and digital touch points to drive growth and reduce costs, while producing and managing a variety of content - catalogs, coupons, web pages, mobile apps, and user-generated content - in real time across multiple platforms to create breakthrough customer experiences”), companies have to Holistic Marketing Management

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meet customer needs anytime, anywhere in today world where physical and virtual environments are rapidly converging, being a real need of “rethinking the analytics that inform companies’ segmentation strategies, the flow of the experiences they design, and the way they set up their internal operations for faster iteration and delivery of service.” (van Bommel, Edelman,and Ungerman, 2014) In an interview with McKinsey’s Luke Collins, David Edelman,(Edelman, 2014) coleader of McKinsey’s global digital marketing strategy group, explained the state of digital marketing. Luke Collins noted from the very beginning that: “The era of the traditional marketing campaign is ending… Few business functions have been as profoundly disrupted by digitization as marketing. The era of expensive campaigns pushing products through mass media has been upended, as consumers, empowered by information, are demanding more and more from the companies they choose to form relationships with.” The interview transcript revealed that what digital allows you to do is flip the current model around and say for almost anybody that is something about what the company has to offer that should be connecting with the customers, having something for each of the customers and creating that range of content and offers, in other words a very different model of marketing, facing particular challenges: an integrated customer-data warehouse; organizational impediments to getting people to work together (the customer’s journey: customers are on a cross-channel journey where they’re going to touch company’s mobile site, use their laptop, talk to somebody over the phone, go into a store) and acknowledge the fact that the mentioned channels are all going to have different roles; the right attitude and leadership (prioritizing the data; getting the right people from different functions to work together; and working on that rapid-cycle test and learn); the right technology backbone, and the capabilities underneath it in order to move the data to different channels and to take the prioritized data and bring that together, by doing both technology-wise, and from a customer-management perspective, recognizing (for senior leaders) that it’s about changing the way you’re operating (about using data, faster cycle times, more interactivity with more empowered customers).

Conclusion At the end of August 2014 eMarketer argued that: “… time spent with mobile devices surpassed time spent with the desktop internet for the first time last year. This also means that we don’t so much “go online” anymore—we simply are online. And being always-connected means that not only are consumers reachable for marketers, they’re also always shopping”. (Ramsey, 2014) There is no doubt that digital customer engagement became a top strategic priority, and companies must master relevant data flow and improve the performance of employees who are at the forefront in dealing with customers, the digitally transformation allowing step by step a closer connection with customers, and accordingly answer to the new requirements of the supply chain management. As the rules of engagement are changed by the digital lives of customers, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) must confirm a more devoted personal attention and a more directly involvement in digital initiatives. Within this context, digital marketing needs to Holistic Marketing Management

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effectively contribute both, to the building of an integrated customer-data warehouse, and to getting people to work together along the customer’s journey as a road map documenting the full experience.

References Costel Iliuță NEGRICEA, Ioan Matei PURCĂREA - Digital Marketing and the Pillars of Shopper Experience, Holistic Marketing Management, Volume 4, Issue 2, Year 2014 Sandeep Raut - Digital Transformation – A need of NOW! June 28, 2014, available at: http://customerthink.com/digital-transformation-a-need-of-now/ Michael Fitzgerald - Eight Steps to Digital Transformation, August 02, 2013, available at: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/eight-steps-to-digital-transformation/ Michael Fitzgerald - The Nine Obstacles to Digital Transformation, October 17, 2013, available at: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-nine-obstacles-to-digital-transformation/ Michael Fitzgerald, Nina Kruschwitz, Didier Bonnet and Michael Welch - Embracing Digital Technology: A New Strategic Imperative, MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with Capgemini Consulting, Research Report 2013, available at: http://www.capgemini.com/resource-fileaccess/resource/pdf/embracing_digital_technology_a_new_strategic_imperative.pdf George Westerman, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee - The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation, MIT Sloan Management Review, Opinion & Analysis, January 07, 2014, available at: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/thenine-elements-of-digital-transformation/ Nikeplus-fuelband, 2014, http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/nikeplus-fuelband Does the Nike Fuelband measure steps or activity? 2012, http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/readonly/doesthe-nike-fuelband-measure-steps-or-activity/QU9UFAKJDF9UPT9FC Theodor Valentin Purcărea - Customers, Companies’ Allies in Co-creating Value with the Support of Digital Technology and Marketers’ Want of Greater Levels of Integration in Their Digital Marketing Suite, Holistic Marketing Management, Volume 4, Issue 2, Year 2014 Ryan Galloway - IT vs. Marketing: How to Prevent Clashes & Reach Your Business Goals, available at: http://www.workintelligent.ly/workstyle/productivity/2014-4-24-it-marketing-business-goals/ W. Brian Arthur - The second economy, McKinsey & Company, 2011, in Jacques Bughin and James Manyika Internet Matters. Essays in Digital Transformation, McKinsey & Company, 2012, pp. 206-211, available at: www.mckinsey.com/.../MGI Internet matters essays in digital transfor...

Chris Wright, Derek Franks - The State of Marketing 2013, IBM’s Global Survey of Marketers, Global Summit 2013, Nashville,May 21-23, 2013, available at: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/zzl03043usen/ZZL03043USEN.PDF The Open University - Perspectives. Strategic marketing. Business perspectives. Business School. Mindset.

Disruption. Customer. Creativity, 2014-02-14, OUBS Perspectives Leadership 03 final pdf, pp. 10-13, available at: ebookbrowsee.net/oubs-perspectives-leadership...

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The digital tipping point, McKinsey Global Survey results, June 2014, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/the_digital_tipping_point_mckinsey_global_survey_results Tunde Olanrewaju, Kate Smaje, and Paul Willmott - The seven traits of effective digital enterprises, McKinsey&Company, May 2014, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/the_seven_traits_of_effective_digital_enterprises http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/ring-fence 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Getting to the Heart of the Consumer and Brand Relationship, Oracle, 2012, oracle.com, available at: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss1560493.pdf Mark Hamstra - IKEA creates omnichannel shopping experience from favorited items in app, Mobile Commerce Daily, July 29, 2014, available at: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/ikea-boosts-content-functionality-forcatalog-app UK Digital Shoppers Buy Often, but In-Store Still Reigns, eMarketer, Jun 27, 2014, available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/UK-Digital-Shoppers-Buy-Often-In-Store-StillReigns/1010933/2 UK Senior Shoppers Increasingly Embracing Digital, eMarketer, Jul 15, 2014, available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/UK-Senior-Shoppers-Increasingly-Embracing-Digital/1011011/2 Joe Dysart - How Can You Best Use YouTube for Inbound Marketing? Target Marketing, August 1, 2014, available at: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/how-can-you-best-use-youtube-inbound-marketing/1 Michael Miller - YouTube for Business, Online Video Marketing for Any Business, Que Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana, Second Edition, 2011, available at: http://www.conceptsatlantadesign.com/site/images/stories/PDF/pearsonyoutube%20for%20business%20online%20video%20marketing%20for%20any%20business%202011.pdf Michael Miller - YouTube for Business, Online Video Marketing for Any Business, Que Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana, Second Edition, 2011, available at: http://www.conceptsatlantadesign.com/site/images/stories/PDF/pearsonyoutube%20for%20business%20online%20video%20marketing%20for%20any%20business%202011.pdf, pp. 14, 21 Edwin van Bommel, David Edelman, and Kelly Ungerman - Digitizing the consumer decision journey, June 2014, McKinsey&Company, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/digitizing_the_consumer_decision_journey David Edelman - Mastering digital marketing, McKinsey&Company, June 2014, available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/mastering_digital_marketing Geoff Ramsey - Big-Picture Perspective on Consumers and Marketing in an Always-On, Digital World, eMarketer, available at: https://www.emarketer.com/go/ana-download

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CRM â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the new business strategy in the digital age Dr. Diana SOCA

Abstract The globalization of economy and markets imposes changes in the activity of companies, including an increase in the involvement of marketing in the management process. Marketing suggests a new way of conduct for economic factors that implies responsiveness to social demands, the ability to adapt to market requirements, innovative spirit, vision and maximum efficiency. At the same time, the development of information technology imposes a reconfiguration of the marketing strategies and business models, and customer relationship management (CRM) is becoming an area of great interest to researchers worldwide.

Key words: CRM, marketing strategy, Internet JEL Classification: M 31

If until recently most companies focused their efforts on their internal process by lowering costs and improving efficiency inside their organization by automating the elements of back-office functions such as production, logistics and finance, currently due to globalization and extremely high competition on all markets, companies need to focus more of their attention towards the management of customer related activities, sales and marketing.

Due to the free market, suppliers have become increasingly proficient in offering quality products and services, and customers themselves have become more demanding and their expectations have increased significantly. Moreover, if their needs are not adequately met, they can react instantly through online social networks, where they can articulate their grievances.

Maintaining market share, profitability, and customer loyalty are more difficult now than ever. Therefore it is very important for a modern enterprise to develop a successful customer relationship management, this alone being a successful strategy which provides customer attraction and loyalty.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business philosophy that describes a strategy which places the customer at the center of an organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s culture and activities.

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Organizations are now discovering that Peter Drucker was a visionary when he claimed that the client is the heart of any organization. In an era of globalization and fierce competition, focusing on the product can’t be a real competitive advantage and the only chance to survive in this market is creating and maintaining a special relationship with the client. Currently CRM uses technology, strategic planning and customized marketing techniques to build a relationship that will increase profits and productivity. A transition is made from the classic 4P (price, product, promotion, place) to 3C, namely customer value, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The CRM philosophy is to recognize that a long-term relationship with customers can be one of the most important assets of an organization. (Cetina, 2006) Managers base their thought process on the principle that it is harder to conquer a customer than to keep an existing one and research on the costs of these two alternatives supports this idea: the costs of winning a new client are between 3 to 15 times higher, depending on the industry and product, than those of keeping a customer loyally involved. It has been found that 1 USD invested in advertising will bring back 5 USD in the long run, while 1 USD invested in CRM strategy, especially in customer loyalty, will bring back 60 USD in the long run.

The objective of CRM is to help companies use technology and human resources to gain new insight into customer behavior and value. A company using a functional CRM strategy can increase its revenues by:  providing those products and services that the customers need;  providing improved services;  cross-selling products;  faster completion of agreements;  keeping old customers, attracting new customers and regaining lost ones.

In order to fulfill these objectives effectively organizations should harmonize the three levels of CRM (strategic, operational and analytical) by managing a multitude of actions, from designing strategies, automating sales activities, services, marketing and communication, to analyzing information and accurately measuring their own performance when it comes to customer relationships.

Strategic CRM A professional CRM strategy will help a company acquire new customers, serve old customers, increase their amount, preserve and determine which customers are loyal and which are interested in more complex services. Strategic CRM can improve customer service by facilitating communication with them through several means:  a multichannel distribution strategy that allows a conjunction between reactive communication channels (SMS, e-mail) and some traditional (telephone) or specific information channels (mailing, websites). Websites for example facilitate customer-supplier collaboration, reducing the administration costs required by

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customer relationships while also offering information about the product and its use and technical assistance 24 hours a day 7 days a week. (Cetina, 2006)  identify how each customer defines quality, and then create a service strategy based on its individual requirements and expectations.  an effective mechanism for evaluating customer satisfaction and opinions regarding a certain purchase and finding customer trends regarding future purchases.  participate in the rapid identification of potential problems before they take place.  a friendly environment for registering customer complaints (complaints that don’t reach the company can’t be solved and they become a major source of customer dissatisfaction)  an effective mechanism for resolving problems and complaints (complaints that are resolved quickly increase customer satisfaction) According to a survey done by Database Group in our country regarding the implementation of CRM strategies on a sample of 100 companies reveals that approximately one third of the companies surveyed have a CRM strategy, but out of these only about 30% have created these strategies on their own. 17.9% of public utilities have a CRM strategy followed by 15.1% of retailers. The level of banks and insurance companies that have a CRM strategy is relatively low (7.7% and 4.4%) but it is expected to increase significantly in the upcoming years.

Operational CRM In customer relationship management, the operational level consists of automating customer contact activities. Software solution providers offer a wide range of CRM solutions that are designed to automate the functions of marketing and facilitate the following activities:  customer segmentation. Databases of customers are a real gold mine for an organization. Through them data is transformed into relevant information for CRM strategies. Systematic structuring of data and identifying customer profiles allow segmentation of the organization’s customer portfolio. Also, in addition to strategies aimed at customer segments, the organization can develop strategies and programs focused on a single client, usually a major client, or one with a very high potential (Panait, 2006).  management of advertising campaigns. The software ensures coordination of activities conducted by various specialists contributing to the design and implementation of advertising campaigns. CRM solutions also automate the process of evaluating a company’s performance.  replying to customer requests. The actions initiated by the client will generate a response from the provider that can be automated to some extent.

The main automated activities regarding the sale force are:

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

opportunity management. CRM software is designed to facilitate sales forecasting, based on both historical data regarding customer purchase behavior and sales staff estimates.  contact management. The software offers multiple features for managing contacts and communication with the clients. Amongst the most common examples are automatic phone dial up, automatic schedule maintenance and automatic drafting of custom emails.  generating offers. The sales agent or consultant can draft a proposal for a customer in a short time using CRM solutions. Thus it is only necessary to introduce certain data such as product codes, volumes, customer name and requirements for delivery and the software solution will calculate costs and provide a price.  shaping the solution for the customer. A selection of components and attributes of supply to meet the potential customer requirements can be achieved by using automation software solutions. Different possible options are combined in order to avoid incompatibilities and to provide the customer with the required benefits.

When it comes to services, CRM software solutions can coordinate communication flows that are specific to different channels used by the organization. Thus, the following activities can be automated:  operations conducted by telemarketing and contact centers. One possible example of such automation is interactive voice response. Customers listen to an instruction menu and can choose the desired option by selecting a number (by pressing a button on the phone).  services provided via the Internet. For example some company websites contain technical manuals with important information regarding the equipment provided by the company. Those can also contain troubleshooting information that often allow the clients to solve certain issues without the help of a specialist. However, in the near future the connection of everyday household equipment such as air conditioners or refrigerators to the Internet will allow remote identification of technical failures by specialists and possibly even remote restoration.  partners' activities when using intermediate channels. Online CRM solutions and websites can ensure proper coordination of partners’ activities trough marketing channels. Thus, important information regarding customers, orders, available stock, products, etc. is managed properly.

The operational level of CRM is an area of major investment in telemarketing centers, customer contact centers and sales force automation systems. That is the reason why today there are many CRM solution providers that offer a wide range of applications capable of enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the operational level.

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Analytical CRM The analytical level of CRM refers to the evaluation of an organization’s performance in dealing with customers and developing strategies and tactics for creating and improving customer relationships. Thus, analytical CRM includes activities involving the collection, storage, analysis and use of information regarding customers.

The focus of analytical CRM includes:  customer identification. Customer Relationship Management requires the collection and storage of data useful for identifying each client. The two major categories of data are basic data - name (for individual customers) , business name (for organizations) , address and additional data - date of birth (for individual customers) , date of incorporation (for organizations) , nationality , field of activity , telephone number , email address , legal form , registration number of the company. The data is stored in a central database so it can be used by all the departments of an organization. These informations should be updated regularly, depending on the notifications of each department communicating with the client. The quality of the data entered into the central database is extremely important for the organization. It ensures quality customer relationships and reduced costs due to errors in data recording.  customer profiling. Adapting a strategy to each client’s needs is possible when the organization holds data and information about customer behavior, as a buyer, user, person or organization. Customer profiling is achieved by assessing the following aspects:  customer value to the organization: the annual value of purchases made by the customer, customer share, the present net value of the generated profit during the course of the customer relationship (25 or more years).  purchasing behavior: typology of products purchased by customer, ordered quantities, order frequency, behavior regarding payments (seriousness, manner of payment, time interval between order and payment).  communication between supplier and customer: communication channels used and preferred by the client (phone, internet, etc.) , types of messages that received a favorable response, the behavior when using certain communication channels (for example when using the Internet - page used to enter or exit to/from the providing organization’s website, length of visit, pages visited by the client, the banners that have captured the client’s interest, etc.)  customer satisfaction: the degree of satisfaction regarding products, services, the organization’s personnel and the communication process.  lifestyle (for individual customers): client’s activities, interests and opinions.  data analysis. In customer relationship management it is essential to come up with solutions to a series of important issues like:  finding a way to distribute customers into homogeneous groups that respond similarly to certain customer relations strategies and development programs.

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 identifying the clients in an organization’s portfolio who should be the target of a certain direct marketing campaign.  assessing the quality of external lists containing information regarding prospects.  measuring customer retention and assessing the likelihood of the relationship’s termination.  assessing which categories of products could be attractive to customers in the context of cross-selling strategies.  identifying products that can be recommended to the customer on the basis of upselling strategies (within the categories of products that the customer already buys from the organization in order to increase the value of its purchases).  measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.  in addition to traditional statistical analysis techniques that have proven their value and sustainability, organizations can use data mining techniques including: neural networks, association rules, decision trees, case-based reasoning, etc.  assessing the effects of marketing activities. The following are just some of the major issues covered by the assessment:  the effectiveness of the sales process. The entire sequence of activities in the sales process is analyzed, from identifying prospects to converting them into customers to retaining them and increasing their value to the supplier.  the effectiveness of customer selection. Identifying the most appropriate target for a campaign of marketing and sales is a major issue. Based on the analysis of available data the organization must take the right decision regarding target segments/niches (the desired share in its customer portfolio), resources allocated to each segment, the ratio of activities meant to attract clients and those meant to increase the value of existing customers.  the contribution of marketing activities to customer value. One of the most important indicators of customer value is the net present value of the profit stream generated by a customer during its relationship with the supplier. The analytical level of customer relationship management also includes performance measurements for marketing strategies and the evaluation of their contribution to increasing the profit generated by the client during his dealings with the supplier.

In order to make the right decision regarding the proper CRM software solutions, the organization needs to clarify its objectives and strategies related to customer relationships in order to increase its marketing actions effectiveness and avoid wasting its resources.

National approaches to customer relationship management Romanian organizations also try to adapt to the global trend of focusing business strategies on customer management in order to compete with multinational companies who are successfully applying the principles of this approach already. But studies show that in many Holistic Marketing Management

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companies in Romania there is some confusion regarding this concept. For some, customer relationship management means implementing loyalty programs only, for others creating a database of customer information to help in achieving a finer segmentation of the market, but few systems have implemented integrated customer relationship systems and have a clear idea of how to use information technology in customer relationship management. The main issue that prevents the creation of computerized systems for customer relationship management is, as revealed by researchers, the insufficient budget allocated by managers for achieving this objective. This is due to the mentality of most Romanian managers that have a short and medium term perspective and are profit oriented (getting quick profit) rather than focused on creating and developing long-term relationships with clients thus ensuring business expansion conditions.

A study by Advantage Software Factory, one of the most popular local providers of CRM solutions, supports the above statements. The research was conducted among more than 100 important companies in areas like banking, real estate, IT and telecommunications and has highlighted the following aspects:  more than half of the large Romanian companies are using CRM software solutions;  90% of the surveyed companies use these software solutions to record complete customer information and keep the interaction history.  the least used feature of CRM solutions is the one for offers deviating from the standard, only 9% of the surveyed companies using a transparent circuit for approving customized offers. The biggest disadvantage resulting from this practice is the inability to create a know-how about atypical or customized offers, thus keeping this experience from everyone except senior managers/salesmen.  only 20% of surveyed companies use the module dedicated to marketing campaigns management, an essential tool for marketing departments that enables the selection of the customers that will be the targets of these campaigns. Hence, a lot of marketing campaigns are often inefficient and almost all customers receive the same promotion, even though sometimes only 10% of them might be interested.  another important but insufficiently used feature, with only 35% of users, is the CRM application that supports interdepartmental communication (sales marketing - technical department), thus increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Effective use of this features would allow sellers to know what problems the clients have and what complaints they have addressed to the technical department, which can subsequently influence sales. Also if companies have different sales teams on various product groups, managing the relationship with the same client should be transparent to all.  on the other end features like gathering customer information, tracking the sales process or extracting various sales reports are used by almost 100% of the surveyed companies.

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Implementing strategies for customer relationship management requires IT platforms that are flexible, interactive and efficient, involving huge investments from companies. Faced with these constraints, partially or fully outsourcing customer relationship management becomes a viable option, considering the number of Romanian companies offering such services has increased and CRM outsourcing services have diversified. These companies possess cutting edge information technology and professional teams of employees that have the necessary skills to obtain outstanding results when it comes to relationship marketing. In turn, client companies get to focus more on strategic activities and achieving a desired performance level and to relieve some employees of customer relationship responsibilities.

Conclusion The most dynamic companies cope with ongoing changes in the economic environment by endeavoring to create their own strategies to meet their customers’ requirements and developing an efficient relationship management.

Organizations are concerned with developing predictive models of their customers’ behavior, anticipating their needs and surpassing their expectations. Alliances between manufacturers, international distribution chains and companies specialized in creating CRM software and technologies have one primary purpose: increasing customer satisfaction. (Buttle, 2006) In Romania, customer relationship management is expanding and improving based on successful examples from international companies, the greatest impediment to the development of this segment being the lack of capital.

References M. Bruhn – Relationship marketing. Management of customer relationships, Pearson Education Limited 2003 F. Buttle – Customer Relationship Management. Concepts and Tools, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford 2006 I. Cetină, R. Brandabur, M. Constantinescu – Marketingul serviciilor teorie şi aplicaţii , Ed. Uranus , Bucureşti 2006 J. Dyche – The CRM Handbook, Addison-Wesley Proffesional, 2001 M. Panait – CRM şi automatizarea forţei de vânzare, Markmedia.ro Th. Purcărea – Managementul relaţiilor cu clienţii, Ed. Universitară Carol Davila, Bucureşti 2011 http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2012/10/02/gartners-magic-quadrant-for-social-crm-and-the-socialenterprise/

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An Interview with Matthew R. Lee, Psychology Professor, James Madison University Ioan Matei PURCĂREA

Professors Matthew R. Lee, Mitsuhiro Shimmen, William Perttula, Costel Negricea, and RAU Student Ioan Matei Purcărea

Matthew R. Lee, Ph.D., is a psychology professor at the James Madison University, known as an excellent communicator, by creating a comfortable atmosphere, being open to questions and willing to have discussions with his students, challenging them, making the class interesting and very enriching. He delivered in May 2014 a very successful “Psychology of Culture” course for the Romanian-American University students.

IMP/HMM: Professor Lee, you are well-known as a true promoter of the social justice, of the real-world critical thinking and engagement, of the same interactive classroom experiences, and of the intergroup dialogue as a classroom methodology. Did your prior jobs contribute to your professional skills and attitude? What made you choose an academic career?

(Matthew R. Lee) Yes, of course. Prior to becoming a professor, I was a graduate student with many roles: an instructor, a therapist, and also a researcher. I chose an academic career because the things I enjoyed most were working with students and making a difference in their lives and I think the best way I could do so was through education and researching the best kinds of educational methods for different kinds of classroom learning.

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(IMP/HMM) I would like to ask you about your research interests, professional goals, and your opinions on professional issues. What is the best thing about being a Professor?

(Matthew R. Lee) My research focuses mostly on the psychology of minority status and also teaching students how to be less discriminatory. My lab students and I study topics such as sexism, genderism, racism, and also a type of phenotypism called hairism. Our most recent study is looking at how baldness is related to negative attitudes in certain situations. My professional goals are related to this, where I enjoy activities related to social justice and helping the larger society understand the psychology of different kinds of minority communities. I think one of the best things about being a professor is having the autonomy to decide what the best way is to help other people in the academic and non-academic world. I love teaching, and I love being in organizations where I can bring people together to understand common ideas. For example, for two years I co-chaired the national Asian American Psychological Association annual convention, and I helped to bring in guest speakers, select innovative proposals, and invite students to present their research for the first time to a professional community.

IMP/HMM: In what ways do you feel you can lend support to students so as to promote a genuine caring for and appreciation of people of other cultural backgrounds?

(Matthew R. Lee) I try in all my classes to help students see how the information they are learning can help them to understand people and ideas from different cultural backgrounds, and to be fair and less judgmental, less stereotyping, to be more accurate in their comprehension of people and their situations. To instill a sense of genuine caring is very difficult, but I use a methodology called intergroup dialogue to achieve this. Intergroup dialogue refers to the idea if you bring people from different backgrounds together to talk about their lives, and how their lives are impacted by ideas you are learning about in class, it can help people see many more ways in which they are common, and also appreciate the ways they are different. Intergroup dialogue takes some time though â&#x20AC;&#x201C; usually over the course of 7-8 weeks, or in the US, a full semester of up to 15 or 16 weeks. Students need to learn how to trust one another by engaging in small exercises where they take some risks to reveal their own ideas and experiences, and little by little they can learn to express deeper ideas, even some emotions, and when everyone in the room can see that, everyone can learn to appreciate one another. In Romania, I have adapted many of my classroom activities to try to have deeper discussions about complex issues and I think they are successful and memorable.

IMP/HMM: Please tell us something about your discussions and social interactions at the level of your collaboration with the Romanian-American University (RAU). Is there a potential for development of the relations?

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(Matthew R. Lee) I have been very fortunate to be invited by RAU for the past few years, and every year I learn different things about Romanian culture and also the university. I really enjoy learning about the surface culture – the language, food, traditional customs, architecture, and things like that. Over time, I am learning to appreciate what psychologists call the “deep culture” – it’s parts of Romania that you cannot always see on the outside, but the more you encounter the culture and understand it, you can see more things going on. For example, I have noticed something that Polish psychologists call “humanism,” which is not a typical norm in the US. With humanism, people are engaged in multiple relationships with you at the same time – for example, they might be a student and also a friend, or they might be a professor and also a tour guide. And, even without notice, the nature of the relationship can change, or the plans will change, but everything will still work out. In the US, people often separate their professional persona from their personal self, so it is a unique aspect for me to see so much humanism in Romania. This year has been my favorite so far, which included my attendance at events from International Week and the Japanese Studies Center. I presented a brief talk on Japanese and Romanian similarities and differences. There is always potential for further development of the relationship between me or my home university and RAU, and we are always open to hearing new ideas.

(IMP/HMM) Thank you very much, Professor Lee.

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The latest issue of our partner journal, „Marketing Science and Inspirations”, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia Theodor Valentin PURCĂREA

JEL Classification: Y30 We are happy to receive by post the latest issue of our partner journal, „Marketing Science and Inspirations”, Vol. IX, Issue 2/2014. „Marketing Science and Inspirations” is an academic journal addressed to academics and practitioners. The latest issue of this journal covers challenging topics in the marketing research field: Modern approaches to current marketing management; Analysis of possibilities to detect the on-line reputation of Universities and Schools of Higher Education in the Slovak virtual market; Approaches to understand guerilla marketing in the context of the current marketing management; Theoretical aspects of marketing management and the importance of understanding and generalization for corporate practice; The readiness of marketing managers to solve the present marketing issues; Marketing, personnel marketing and their application in university practice. Part I. Holistic Marketing Management

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The journal also includes other sections such as: Marketing Briefs (Hidden Research Subjects in Marketing Science), Reviews (Creativity in advertising; Emotion in marketing: how to deal with customer's heart), Marketing Contests (Marketing of the Year Contest 2013 has its Winner), Dictionary of Useful Marketing Terms.

It is worth to remember that the Editor-in Chief, Professor Peter Starchon, Faculty of Management, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, is also Member of the Editorial Boards of the “Holistic Marketing Management” Journal and of the “Romanian Distribution Committee Magazine”. We remembered with pleasure our meeting in Koln, Germany, in 2011, on the occasion of the working meeting of European Retail Academy (ERA).

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