Exploring Direct &
Customer Relationship
Marketing

Second Edition
Martin Evans, Lisa O'Malley
and Maurice Patterson
ISBN: 1861529015

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Student Profiles

The following profiles provide students' perspectives on working in Direct and Relational Marketing. They describe how they have applied course learnt knowledge to the new data-informed marketing environment.

Student profile 1

While studying Business Administration at Cardiff University I became very interested in the IT aspects of a Strategic Management module. This covered the role of technology in marketing and, in particular, the role that sophisticated databases and data interrogation could play in building relationships with the customer.

We further addressed the skills gap that exists between the technical staff concerned with developing the software and the business managers who, with little understanding of the technical aspects, use the software to make decisions. It was clear that the very different priorities and even the language used by these two groups could be a major problem for organisations to overcome.

At this point I decided to pursue a career within this ‘grey area’. I am now studying for an MSc Computer Science at University College London and following this I hope to work in IT consultancy. While this year will only give me a general introduction to computer systems, I hope that combined with my business background it will significantly increase my understanding of business improvement through IT.

Student profile 2

During my postgraduate studies in Business Administration at Cardiff University I obtained deeper insight of the marketing aspects related to the technology. This was mostly covered in the Marketing Module and in one of the elective modules that I had chosen, E-commerce.

In both those modules, we examined in depth the important role of Data Warehousing in the collection and proper use of the data in the process of developing CRM strategies in order for the companies to gain a deeper communication and relationship with the customers.

Due to my undergraduate degree which is in Computer Science, during the MBA course I developed a great interest in the field of IT related with Marketing. This area is a highly problematic one since there is an important skills gap between the Managers who develop the strategies for a company and the technical staff of the IT department who implement those strategies.

I am now working as a Software Analyst in a company in Greece and I have to confront this skills gap in “real-time”. Most of the managers are not aware of how the IT department functions while on the other hand the IT department is too technical focused. Generally, I am trying due to the two degrees I have, to bridge this gap but most of the times this is a very hard task and it need to be addressed from both sides.