Up Close and Personal
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When I was asked to review ‘Up Close and Personal’ I thought I was about to be treated to a trip to the movies. Instead, Gamble et al. ’s book was delivered by the Royal Mail. Another time, perhaps. The title of the book describes the content pretty well. ‘Up Close and Personal? Customer Relationship Marketing @ Work’. The concept of getting personal with customers is certainly what the book focuses on and the issue of relationship marketing (RM) provides a reasonable integrating framework for the many topics presented by the writers. I return to RM later because I think this aspect could be explored in greater depth and breadth. The ‘@ work’ suffix is perhaps a bit of a giveaway, because the book tends to focus on the company end of RM rather than on customer roles and reactions to RM. Overall I feel this is a serious book on RM. Serious can sometimes mean boring and staid, but not here because the book is eminently readable. One of the major strengths of the writers is their enviable track record of access to a vast range of companies’ experiences of direct interaction with, and management of, their customers. The manifestation of this is a wealth of company-based case material producing transferable lessons in a lively way. Indeed, the reporting of a
䉷 Henry Stewart Publications 1350-2328 (2000)
Vol. 8, 1, 93–94
great variety of dimensions of RM provides a very useful summary of best — and not so best — practice. We can all learn from this. I do, however, confess to being confused over the integration of the many strands: customer orientation; understanding and knowledge; database marketing; relationships; and loyalty. Should the synthesis of all this be called relationship marketing, or interactive marketing or what? The hype surrounding relationship marketing, will I think, soon turn to an equally rapid decline. But, whatever we call it, the synthesis manifested in this book is certainly of importance to all marketers (whether they recognise themselves as being at the transactional’ or ‘relationship’ end of the continuum). Gamble et al. also provide some underpinning for their propositions from marketing and other theory, but, I suspect, not as much as some academics would prefer. Having said this, the book is presumably aimed at the practitioner market rather than purporting to be a mainstream academic textbook. In this context I applaud the writers for not distilling their mountain of information and knowledge down to a series of checklists and ‘grids’. There are some of these, mostly relevant and helpful ones, but there is a tendency for consultants to provide over-simplified and therefore
Journal of Database Marketing
93
Book review
rather glib summaries — training programmes in short. Although these are often well received they do not always do justice to what are usually far more complex issues. As far as writing style is concerned, the reader will detect different styles. For example, there is a checklist style at times and this contrasts with more of a narrative elsewhere. This is a minor issue
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