(A) Methodology of eCRM adapting conjoint segmentation method

Abstract

One-to-one marketing is a tool of Electronic Business Customer Relationship Management (eCRM). Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most recent marketing approaches. Many businesses today realize the importance of CRM and its potential to help them achieve and sustain a competitive edge. These organizations are already changing their business processes and building technology solutions that enable them to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and maximize customers’ lifetime value. Then companies put such information into their own predefined marketing framework to generate pinpoint information which they hope will persuade the target customers into intended consuming behavior. This process is called market segmentation (Wind, 1978) with which marketers can easily determine who the target customers are what motivates them to respond, and how their lifetime value can be increased (Wells Et al., 1999). Market segmentation has long been considered one of the most fundamental concepts of modern marketing (Wind, 1978). There exist several variables suitable for market segmentation- geographic, demographic, psychosocial and behavioral (Kotler & Armstrong, 1999). In the case of Internet shopping malls, it is much easier to get and store each customer’s history (Arunkundram & Sundarajan, 1998 ). This can be the best starting point for the market segmentation process. Benefit segmentation will be a particular focus of attention. This is a more powerful form of market segmentation with the purpose of grouping customers (or consumers) according to the different benefits that they seek from a product (Kotler & Armstrong, 1999). Conjoint analysis has been used popularly for assessing the benefits (Green & Srinivasan, 1990, Vriens et. al., 1996; Green & Desarbo, 1979) and understanding consumers’ preferences (Green & Srinivasan, 1978). Although conjoint analysis has been extensively used in traditional benefit segmentation, it has been rarely used to s...