For the past few years CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been the obvious model for any business interested in creating customer satisfaction. Today’s article in Dagens Media is however pointing out that the next step, CIM (Customer Involvement Management) is crucial for addressing the next generation consumers, that is – people that grew up with the opportunity to design their own identity and therefore there own brand identity. CIM is new, it’s in development. The term has just recently and sort of insufficient been addressed in Wikipedia. (I’ll give it another month or so and then we probably have a good account of the term.)
As much as I get excited about companies increasing interest in consumers, I am worried that they will take the easy way out by assembling focus groups or in some other “creative” way have …“to many chefs spoiling one soup”. An in depth ethnographic study will merge both CRM and CIM and instead of having a chaotic group of layman experts getting you puzzled about the waste amount of information you will receive, you will have experienced “translator” disentangle the material and pinpoint segmentation, positioning, development, communication, and so on.
