Correspondence: Tyrone W. Jackson, California State University Los Angeles, USA. Tel: +1 323 343 2970; Fax: +1 323 343 5462; e-mail: tjackso4@calstatela.edu

¹is an associate professor in Marketing at California State University, Los Angeles. He has more than 17 years of industry experience working with Global 500 companies. He has held senior management positions for global management consulting firms, Accenture and KPMG Consulting (BearingPoint). His areas of expertise are in direct marketing, data mining, analytics, CRM and business intelligence. He earned his MA from Yale University in Economics; and MS and PhD in Marketing Science and Econometrics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Received 5 November 2007; Revised 5 November 2007; Published online 3 December 2007.

Abstract

Personalisation has been utilised by various companies in the electronic marketplace. Gartner research stated that by 2004, 80 per cent of content-rich IT applications (eg news sites, e-tailers and corporate intranets) will incorporate personalisation. Personalisation is becoming more of an increasing segment of the internet economy. Customer relationship management (CRM) has been an accepted strategy of companies in order to improve their performance. The concept of personalisation and CRM has expanded in scope to emphasise a much broader notion of benefits to a company. The focus of this paper is to determine whether companies can increase the return generated by their electronic commerce strategy by utilising 'personalisation' in executing CRM in the electronic marketplace. A case-study approach was utilised to identify personalisation strategies and its benefits. Lessons learned from the cases examined revealed that companies should approach personalisation from an inter-functional as opposed to a 'silo' implementation to reap maximal benefits. Our research found that competitive pressures and cost savings helped to spurn the use of personalisation. Personalisation requires 'anticipating relevant intent' of customers in order to increase benefits. Other key findings identified that companies, both business to business (b2b) and business to consumers (b2c), employing personalisation improves the benefits of CRM.