Barriers to Successful Implementation of Database Marketing: A Cross-Industry Study

摘要

This paper analyses perceived barriers to the deployment of database marketing (DBM) Systems in the financial services, retail and travel industries. Cost is perceived as a primary barrier to adoption across the three industries. However, retail and travel place relatively more importance on organisational and strategic barriers to adoption than do financial services organisations. The financial services industry, by contrast, views barriers to DBM deployment as, generally, technical in nature. We infer that such a view indicates that the future deployment of more sophisticated, strategically orientated, DBM systems within the financial services industry will be impeded. Within the retail and travel industries, use of increasingly sophisticated systems was found to be linked to an increasing recognition of the importance of a variety of organisational and strategic barriers, and in particular the existence of a database marketing strategy. We infer that the implementation of DBM in both retail and travel industries is driven by strategic issues and, as such, organisations in these industries are generally more likely to gain competitive advantage from their IT investment than organisations in the financial services industry.