NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

IT is increasingly promoted as the means for delivering effective sales and marketing within all those enterprises in which the customer remains invisible apart from the transactions he or she makes. In the world of call centres and web sites, customers are the sum of their transactions. IT makes the transactions possible, and makes it possible to track, identify and, ultimately, also manage the customer.

But even in the bricks'n' mortar world of conventional, off-line business, the customer relationship is king. Although the transactions may take place in the physical world, conventional businesses, too, increasingly believe that understanding the transactions is the key to understanding the customer and not the other way round. In this respect, if in no other, all businesses aspire to become e-businesses and all sales and marketing is e-sales and marketing.

In principle, e-businesses are enterprises which 'virtualise' their operations, reducing themselves to the purest form of selling. Stripped of all encumbrances such as overheads, staffing costs, and the need for stockholding, the e-business is ultimately an entirely transaction-driven affair surviving on revenue generation alone.

An Internet book-seller may hold no stock and have only the most basic sort of bricks'n'mortar existence.

The company may source its books from any number of suppliers anywhere in the world even from alternative printers and publishers or from other book-sellers and it may, in turn, supply books to customers anywhere in the world.

Look on the web site of Amazon.com, or any other Internet book-seller, and you will find sophisticated IT applications which correlate the sales of particular titles to individual customers and analyse buying habits, so that the system can suggest books a customer may be interested in purchasing or alternatives if one title is out of stock.

The Internet book-seller approach is described as customer relationship management (or marketing) or sometimes as one-to-one marketing and is increasingly seen as the paradigm for all modern retailing. It can be thought of as a delivery chain image of the supply chain approach known as micro-managing.

Micro-managing is a concept developed in conventional store-based retailing. In the micro-managed enterprise, as soon as one carton of detergent is sold, another one is delivered to the shelf to replace it. Customer relationship marketing presumes that as soon as a customer walks through the door (or logs on to a web site), the carton of detergent she or he wants (or, at least, a customised list of products she or he may want) presents itself.

In reality, pure-play e-businesses have not proved to be universally successful for a number of reasons, but the approach to marketing that they have pioneered is increasingly being adopted by conventional and hybrid (on- and off-line) businesses. The critical ingredients are a focus on brand and customers and the use of IT to build and exploit customer relationships.