Holistic Conception of Marketing - Essay Example

Ulrich and Ellison (1999. pp656) emphasized that holistic customer requirements can impact even the fundamentals of a firm - the organizational architectures and product architectures. They argued that more holistic requirements from customers will require more integrated product development organizations with some heavyweight project managers that have the capability to translate "hard to articulate" customer requirements into technical specifications of the components of products. In the modern era of stringent global competitiveness, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has taken prominent space in the global context as it has evolved as proven tool for customer retention and customer share development.

As argued by Verhoef (2003. pp35), achieving positive customer relationship perceptions through satisfaction, payment equity and affective commitment are the primary objectives of customer relationship management. However, Garcia-Murillo and Annabi (2002. pp876-879) argued that a very crucial system called "Customer Knowledge Management (CKM)" is largely ignored in the modern marketing world which is critical to achieve holistic customer information to achieve the global competitiveness. They presented a framework in which customer knowledge needs to be a part of integrated firm knowledge system comprising of knowledge of suppliers, products, industry, employees, operations and competitors.

This system can ensure a much bigger picture of customer needs and to the level & effectiveness the organization can fulfil them by collaborating information from various knowledge bases - plants & machineries capacities & capabilities, people competencies, production flows, quality controls & assurance, legal issues, uniqueness aspects such that competitors cannot copy them so easily, etc. The authors emphasized that customer knowledge management is important to arrive at better & timely design of new products & services that can be accepted by the customers, generate early warnings about reducing competencies of the company, improve competitive intelligence, achieve synergy within the organization towards meeting customer needs and demonstrate commitment to customer.

They established differences between CRM and CKM whereby CKM is presented as two way system that can capture customer's ideas, concepts, experiences and improvement areas. It justifies the role of holistic customer information capturing as discussed by Svensson (2001. pp95-101) and is very much applicable in the modern world of global marketing opportunities. Conclusion:In this short essay, the author presented that Customer Knowledge Management is the modern system that can ensure capturing of holistic view of customer information for firms to develop customer oriented products and market them even at global scales.

Reference List: Garcia-Murillo, M and