Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management (ETDs)

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    The activation of individual customer intimacy towards a financial organisation through personalised marketing in South Africa
    (2021) Visagie, Marné
    South African financial organisations face challenges to emotionally connect with a diverse, financially vulnerable consumer market. It is well-researched that building customer value drives growth and profitability. This study explores the concept of customer intimacy – a value discipline presented by Treacy and Wiersema (1993) – as a marketing strategy focused on perceptions of value to create, communicate and deliver emotional experiences. It investigates personalisation as the leveraged customer information and one-to-one customer relationship to individually target and activate a customer’s feelings of intimacy during digital interactions. In this context, when a customer feels understood and appreciated, they experience intimacy, a warm feeling, or a sense of belonging. Social connections might draw attention, motivate engagement, and positively influence attitudes and behaviours to build emotional connections. A neuromarketing experiment observed the personalised experience and intimacy effect to predict an emotional connection. Adapting to remote research during the Covid-19 pandemic required three instruments: facial coding, an interview, and a survey. Two groups were selected; existing clients (emotionally connected) and non-clients (not connected). They joined an online video meeting to interact with two different email communications. Recorded emotional responses were analysed with facial expression software, themes, and statistics. Results reveal a positive relationship: personalisation as an intimate experience is significant in predicting the customer’s attitude towards the organisation. The two critical intimacy influencers are the accuracy of the organisation’s customer knowledge and the quality of the financial adviser relationship. Two surprising findings were extracted; the emotionally connected responded insignificantly, while non-clients reacted significantly. Also, the customer knowledge an adviser holds might have an adverse effect on the experience. Findings suggest that personalisation and multiple intimate interactions support the activation of an emotional connection. Implementing and activating individual customer intimacy requires individual targeting, close relationships, and personalised marketing campaigns
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    The efficacy of strategic customer relationship management in South African Business-To-Business organisations
    (2021) Singh, Sasha
    In an era of digitalisation where emerging technologies are leading the digital economy, the need for strategically aligned CRM has become imperative for organisations operating in B2B sectors. However, strategic CRM, is not prevalent in current operational structures, and is still an immature discipline in emerging markets and specifically within a South African context. Strategically driven CRM should provide a direct correlation to an organisations digital information structures to ensure and positively increase business continuity. These capabilities are imperative, overall misalignment of strategic business imperatives endure a snowball effect to operational management frameworks. Cohesion of new and existing customer information is necessitated to ensure tailored individual human experiences through a holistic customer experience approach. These should benefit both the customer and the organisation resulting in end-to-end value creation. To enhance the credibility of arriving at a comprehensive understanding of the research question, a qualitative method geared towards strategic change initiatives was applied. Utilising the Gioia methodology approach, the data sets employed were gathered in the form of semi-structured interviews from a sample of 15 B2B industry experts across multiple disciplines to adequately assess and analyse the derived research propositions. The study found evidence that supports existing contemporary strategic CRM models available in isolation of variable factors, additional dimensions of customer knowledge led practice and customer centricity highlighted that a performance culture were evident. These were emphasised as relevant supporting pillars and key determinants for successful strategic CRM through organisational knowledge sharing and exchange criteria. This research considers the implications of customer knowledge management as a process workflow within a strategic CRM framework. Whilst reviewing applicable relational constructs specific to current and associated factors adapted to emerging markets by considering people led systems as dependent constructs