The Implications of the Development and Implementation of CRM for Knowledge Management

The Background To The Conceptual Development Of Crm

In spite of much interest and effort, Relationship Marketing persistently remains ambiguous as a concept. In varied attempts to unravel its conceptual and fundamental underpinnings, several academics have defined Relationship Marketing (Harker, 1999). However, rather than clarify what the concept truly encompasses in reality, many of these definitions have instead arguably limited the scope of the concept. Consequently, depending on which position is being favoured, Relationship Marketing has been described as a specific type of marketing, such as database marketing or services marketing, or even as a series of actions. At other times, the concept has been described as a single entity, which embraces almost every other marketing discipline (Berry, 1983; Gummesson, 1997a,b; Morgan and Hunt, 1994). As such, the precise meaning of Relationship Marketing is not always clear in literature.