Information antecedents of personalisation and customisation in business-to-business service markets

Interactive marketing (IM) is an organisationally-held process that uses customer information to customise products and to personalise marketing communications and offers to create relevant dialogues with customers. The ‘engine’ behind IM is the development and management of a customer database as an organisational capability. This paper uses the extant literature relating to the learning organisation, marketing and information technology, supplemented by field interviews with marketing executives, to develop and operationalise constructs for the IM processes of personalisation and customisation and their customer information management antecedents. The paper develops measures for each construct, tests the validity of these measures statistically and empirically examines the association between these variables. Results indicate that amassing customer ‘touchpoint’ information is not associated with personalisation and customisation. Customisation activity is associated with the collection of sales force information, personalisation capability with overall data quality, marketing information and the ability to disseminate information throughout the firm.