A recent industry event solicitation highlighted a keynote address by “the godfather of CRM.” Yes, yes, it was an offer one couldn’t refuse, lest one sleep with the fishes. Attend, or the godfather will put an orange peel in his mouth and chase you through a garden. Get it out of your system now, kids.
I don’t have a general objection to titles that show reverence: There are some marketing giants, such as Lester Wunderman or Stanley Fenvessy, who deserve every possible parental honorific.
But “godfather”? It’s a curious title. In Christian faiths, a godparent is a close family friend who (traditionally) takes responsibility for the child’s religious education or (contemporarily) cares for the child if the parents are unable to do so.
In Judaism the godparent role, while not expressly called such, is sometimes bestowed upon an individual who holds a male child steady while a mohel performs a ritual circumcision. Among those actually being circumcised, the more common appellation for this individual is “You miserable son of a [untranslatable from the Yiddish].”
The best reaction to parentage-as-accolade came from Paul Krassner, a satirist People magazine described as “the father of the underground press.” Krassner’s response? “I demand a blood test.”
In this particular instance, chances are pretty good the godfather-of-CRM designation was a public relations construct entirely out of the speaker’s control. (One would hope, anyway; it’s rather unseemly to demand an honorific. In its early days MTV was rumored to have been contractually obligated to refer to Michael Jackson as “The King of Pop.” How fallen are the mighty.)
That said, if CRM must have a godfather, one could do worse than Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor and former editor of Harvard Business Review who, in his 1960 essay “Marketing Myopia,” used a familial reference in his statement “Marketing is a stepchild.”
“Selling is not marketing,” Levitt continued. “[Selling] does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy consumer needs.”
Even if Levitt didn’t use the specific term “customer relationship management,” this essay codified these ideas nearly 50 years ago. And that’s far from his sole contribution to the craft. Among his extensive writings, Levitt penned the standard anecdote illustrating the above sentiment. In Levitt’s example, railroads let their golden age pass when they thought of themselves as being in the railroad business rather than the transportation business.
Levitt would be a damn good nominee for the DMA’s Hall of Fame, although his candidacy is somewhat hampered by his death in 2006, which left him ill-positioned to buy a table or two at the annual awards ceremony. But wotthehell, how many tables did 2004 inductee Benjamin Franklin underwrite?
Truth be told, CRM doesn’t need a godfather. What it really could use is a Dutch uncle — someone capable of giving wrongheaded marketing practitioners a swift kick in the netherlands.
For more of Richard H. Levey’s Loose Cannon columns, visit http://directmag.com/opinions-columnists/loosecannon/index.html.
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