Do CRM systems cause one-to-one marketing effectiveness? (English) Zbl 1426.62323

Mithas, Sunil; Almirall, Daniel; Krishnan, M. S.

Stat. Sci. 21, No. 2, 223-233 (2006).

Summary: This article provides an assessment of the causal effect of customer relationship management (CRM) applications on one-to-one marketing effectiveness. We use a potential outcomes based propensity score approach to assess this causal effect. We find that firms using CRM systems have greater levels of one-to-one marketing effectiveness. We discuss the strengths and challenges of using the propensity score approach to design and execute CRM related observational studies. We also discuss the applicability of the framework in this paper to study typical causal questions in business and electronic commerce research at the firm, individual and economy levels, and to clarify the assumptions that researchers must make to infer causality from observational data.

MSC:

62P10

Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis

Keywords:

causal analysis; potential outcomes; propensity score; matching estimator; customer relationship management systems; electronic commerce

Software:

pscore; Stata

References:

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