Targeted Marketing

While at Fidelity, I worked in the CRM department. CRM stands for Customer Relations Management - basically what we would do is, we would work on the information coming off the web. People would write in asking for information, and the analysts' jobs were to match those people (given the info they had provided in their application for information) to the products they'd be most interested in. E. g. if someone said they were thinking of retirement, they'd be sent 401(k) information. I wasn't an analyst who did the matching - my job was in QA, to make sure that the website was working properly.

CRM is kind of on its way out these days, but that seems, to me, to be because it wasn't handled well by most companies. At Fidelity, it was understood that a human factor was needed, but in many other companies, the thought was that they could just buy some miracle software package which would do their target marketing for them - that's a pipe dream here in 2002, of course.

Pipedream, you say? So it seems... Then again, maybe not:
http://www.FoolQuest.com/casa.htm

Good to know that there are smart businesses out there.

I consulted one company long time ago. Day 1 was like oppening the eyes to the little kitten that was just born.

Anyway, enough talk.