A conceptual framework for the direct marketing process using business intelligence

Abstract

Direct marketing is becoming a key strategy for organisations to develop and maintain strong customer relationships. This method targets specific customers with personalised advertising and promotional campaigns in order to help organisations increase campaign responses and to get a higher return on their investments. There are, however, many issues related to direct marketing, ranging from the highly technical to the more organisational and managerial aspects. This research focuses on the organisational and managerial issues of the direct marketing process and investigates the stages, activities and technologies required to effectively execute direct marketing.

The direct marketing process integrates a complex collection of marketing concepts and business analytics principles, which form an entirely ‘self-contained’ choice for organisations. This makes direct marketing a significantly difficult process to perform. As a result, many scholars have attempted to tackle the complexity of executing the direct marketing process. However, most of their research efforts did not consider an integrated information system platform capable of effectively supporting the direct marketing process. This research attempts to address the above issues by developing a conceptual framework for the Direct Marketing Process with Business Intelligence (DMP-BI). The conceptual framework is developed using the identified marketing concepts and business analytics principles for the direct marketing process. It also proposes Business Intelligence (BI) as an integrated information system platform to effectively execute the direct marketing process.

In order to evaluate and illustrate the practicality and impact of the DMP-BI framework, this thesis adopts a case study approach. Three case studies have been carried out in different industries including retailing, telecommunication and higher education. The aim of the case studies is also to demonstrate the usage of the DMP-BI framework within an organisational context. Based on the case studies’ findings, this thesis compares the DMP-BI framework with existing rival methodologies. The comparisons provide clear indications of the DMP-BI framework’s benefits over existing rival methodologies.