It’s a marketer’s dream — the ability to develop interactive relationships with individual customers. Technology, in the form of the database, is making this dream a reality. Now companies can keep track of customer preferences and tailor advertising and promotions to those needs. Blattberg and Deighton explore the impact of this development on marketing practice and give practical advice on designing a marketing database and staffing an interactive marketing department. They also address the public debate over marketing and privacy.

A national preoccupation with U.S. international industrial competitiveness, driven by our continuing enormous balance of payments deficit, has tended to focus media and political attention during the 1980s on manufacturing. A torrent of books and articles has inundated business managers, offering guidance on how to improve manufacturing performance. Terms like “world class manufacturing” and “dynamic [...]

Organizational America is working very hard these days to become more competitive. Few organizations have been spared the necessity of taking serious action to fight increased pressures from home and abroad. The message is clear: either become more competitive or run the risk of going out of business.
Organizations have responded to this edict with a [...]