Grey Worldwide : Strategic Repositioning

Through CRM

Harvard Business school case

What is Grey WW-HK/China?

What do they do?

Background

• Established in 1978

• Communications industry– Focuses on Communication– Wide range of Marketing

• 16 global partner companies across the world

• Specializes in Integrated Marketing Expertise

What is the present scenario?

Looking to expand its base in Asian Markets, especially

China

Objectives of the company?

• Create customer value through GRM

• Integrated Marketing Approach

• Shift focus from Brand equity to customer equity

• Strengthen integrated customer knowledge database

• Assess and arrive at measurable Return of investment goals

• Take CRM platforms across the organization

• One-to-one customer relations

• One stop support management

• Focus on GRM to provide best solutions

What are the issues being faced?

Rising Consumer Expectations

New Technologies resulting in low price

competitors

Increasing Competition

Other issues?

• Increasing cost of acquiring new customers

• Pure-online players producing competitive high quality products at lower prices

• Strong price pressure

• Smaller Asian Market

CRM in Asia?

• Smaller Market

• AMR Research says CRM industry would be $17b by 2003

• Including CRM for 600 million difficult than 60 million

• 14 times growth is expected between 1986 to 1999

Some trivia

• Cost to acquire new customer is 5 times than retaining the new customer

• Only 50% of sales are accounted from CRM performance

• 11 customers acquired by spending $3500 whereas 23 customers retained for same cost

So, what is the strategy used then?

Do not compete on cost with competition

Build a better, efficient and cost effective CRM strategy

Repositioning with defined e-marketing

Data mining and customer focus as key focus area

Differentiate from competitors through CRM preposition

Customer Management

Plan

Customer care

Customer growth

Customer Loyalty

Customer Acquisition

Philosophy for customer Management focus

• Build Brands

• Develop and manage customers

• Create positive brand experience for customers

• Knowledge of customers through constant dialogue

Grey Relationship Management

Brand Futures+ - Target companies that had traditional marketing needs.

GRM Charter – Target companies that has strong marketing and brand but want to develop the CRM vision and plan.

GRM Philosophy

• Create, identify, evaluate, enhance Grey IP

• Institutionalize key processes and strategies that are developed through customer interaction

• Cross functional skill development for team

What steps can be followed by Grey to implement the CRM

solution?

• Perform customer analysis, segmentation and market analysis

• Know more about customers faster than competition and turn that knowledge into action even faster

• Campaigns and programmes leading towards CRM strategy

• Online and offline strategic consulting

• Educating customers about products and benefits/risks

• Look for external opportunities to raise revenue as part of cost cutting

• Develop strategies and products to retain existing customers

• GRM philosophy training to employees

• Redefine customer value

• Deliver customer centric strategy by integrating and evolution of strong feedback mechanism

• Interaction with customers through CRM, one stop helpdesk..

• Process optimization in front-end and back-end office systems

• Position itself as trusted, sustainable partner among clients

• This solution should be customizable to support future expansion for Grey

CRM implementation ideally positions Grey in the optimum space of

Knowledge and Strategy execution

And how do we measure the effectiveness of the CRM

implementation?

• Brand equity

• Customer Loyalty

• Customer Retention

References

• https://hbr.org/product/grey-worldwide-strategic-repositioning-through-crm/HKU164-PDF-ENG

• Janemcalevey.com

• http://www.authorstream.com/

Disclaimer

Created by S Varadharajan, IIT Madras, during an internship by Prof. Sameer Mathur, IIM Lucknow.

www.IIMInternship.com