Customer Relationship Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility: Not just ethical standpoints or business strategies

Customer Relationship Marketing has been described as a concept that not only relates to sales, marketing and services automation, but also increasingly embraces enterprise‐resource planning applications as well as the tracking of relationships, which organisations have with their customers and their suppliers. Accordingly, the concept has attracted such attention from the academic and professional arena that in contemporary terms CRM may indeed adequately be referred to as a major trend. Yet, in spite of extensive coverage, much confusion and cynicism have also surrounded the concept. Likewise the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has not only attracted much interest, but also much uncertainty and even scepticism. Although the prevailing dichotomy within this discourse arguably resides in whether as concepts, CSR and CRM, should in fact be regarded as ethical standpoints or merely as business strategies, this paper docs not intend to look upon these two concepts with such a binary polarity. Instead, this paper builds upon the similarities between the two concepts to suggest a third kind of ethos; albeit clichéd yet plausible.